Ninth International Conference on Food Studies

Abstract

Legumes are at the centre of policy debates concerning global food security, sustainable food production systems and our transformation towards more sustainable food systems. Where they exist, policies to realise legume-based food production have failed to increase legume-based diets and even production over the long term. The marginal role of legumes in agri-food systems illustrates ‘pars pro toto’ our unbalanced agri-food systems which are ‘locked-in’ to unsustainable states of operation that systematically obliviate the true economic, social and environmental costs of current production and consumption patterns. Such legume paradox presses for more effective policy innovations to avoid further incoherencies among policies across sectors. However, this needs to be realised in a highly fragmented, unknowable, ‘no-one-stop-shop’ policy environment. Public funding for legume production and consumption would provide clear opportunities for synergies, as ‘sustainable diets’ might be a policy goal that is most widely acknowledged. New insights from the public deliverables of the EU-funded H2020 project “Transition paths to sustainable legume-based systems in Europe” (TRUE), and the multi-stakeholder European Legume Innovation Network (LIN) workshops (www.true-project.eu/lin-workshops/) will be presented. Our results point out how to enable co-innovative practices to bring into effect policies that may more successfully support current, and future, food and nutritional security challenges via the use of legumes. Consumers’ demand for nutritious, affordable, environmentally friendly food needs to rely on the diversification of the agri-food systems which entails supply chain actors’ cooperation towards a more-effective policy environment.