I'm an economist: optimizing (or economizing!) is what is in my head a lot. That makes things tricky when I go to the grocery store because there are so many ways to conceive of what makes a good deal. Probably the first thing you would think of is a price reduction, but is even half price tuna a good deal? You'll want to check the "best buy" date, of course, but is it good for us? After all, tuna may be part of a healthy diet, but what about the amount of mercury it might contain? Finally, it's also a good idea to check the product's impact on the environment; the Monterey Bay guide can help you learn whether it casts your fish in a favorable light. So to sum up, in our shopping cart we need to optimize over different aspects of health, price, taste, and environmental impact. Get all that?
If we step back from the grocery store to think in slightly larger terms, we might start thinking in terms of food systems. In fact, the choices available to us in the supermarket are driven only partly by consumer choice: the food system makes a lot of choices for us. GAIN is an organization that's working at a high level to transform food systems, and they are preparing for the UN Food Systems summit in a few days. One of their goals is to produce an "IPCC for food," modeled on the tremendous amount of scientific resources that contributed to the Nobel Peace Prize shared with Al Gore. [***Update: this article is opposed to the idea, arguing that similar organizations already exist.]
One example of a way that food systems might change is this example of a reimagination of the diet of Indonesia. That country gathers lots of data on its diet, and this research team investigated how to optimize the country's diet across the many dimensions of health and environmental impact. Their plan calls for some serious changes, including eating less rice in favor of more animal products and/ or more pulses, nuts, and seeds. I wouldn't have guessed that more meat would be the way to go, but here's the figure!
