One Food

One Food is an international transformative movement to produce safe, nutritious, and sustainable food for all. By embedding One Health principles into food systems, One Food aims to balance and optimize the health of humans, animals, plants and the environment. 

Food systems are insecure and inequitable, with barriers to accessing affordable, safe and nutritious food and with diet-related illness impacting on health and productivity. Food systems are also highly impacted by climate change and biodiversity loss, as well as being one of the single biggest contributors to them. The food systems of the future will need to produce more food, of higher nutritional value, under increasingly challenging conditions – all while reducing their environmental footprint and addressing societal inequity. We need food systems transformation and we need it to recognise that food, humans and their environment are inter-related entities.

One Food seeks to employ a ‘systems’ thinking approach to bring together deep specialisms in new collaborative ways to design and champion sustainable food system design. 

Read more on the background to One Food.

The One Food approach to food systems is rooted in the principles of economic, environmental, and social sustainability. To make change we need to focus on the hazards (i.e. problems) associated with food, but traditionally we tend to consider hazards in isolation, neglecting their interconnectedness, or to only focus on individual food sectors. One Food is developing the “One Food Risk Tool”, a quantitative tool that allows users to estimate the impact of multiple hazards through and across all food sectors, generating information on risks to animal/plant health (i.e. our food), human health (individual wellbeing and societal health) and environment health (biodiversity, ecosystem quality and climate resilience). 

The major benefit of the tool is that it will allow hazards impacting on food production to be evaluated in the same space as those impacting on natural resources and on people, allowing users to explore trade-offs and to identify solutions with maximum benefit for food security, social equity and the environment. 

Identifying and solving food system problems needs data and evidence. One Food is exploring what this means in practice, creating a ‘recipe’ for food system characterisation and by gathering evidence on under-represented topics.

Working with economists, ecologists, climate scientists, food safety experts, health scientists and social scientists from governments, academia and NGOs, we are building a ‘Community of Practice’ that brings previously disparate deep specialisms together around a shared belief – better, safer foods that support people and nature.