Sustainable nourishment and livelihoods: Optimising plant-based food and health systems check access
Author Identifier (ORCID)
Abstract
We can eat for optimal health and wellbeing in various ways, irrespective of sociocultural diversity, but dependent on food system governance to ensure accessibility, affordability and sustainability. Our nutritional ecology or ‘econutrition’ is, however, contingent on local and global biodiversity, energy inputs and proximity to potable water. Climate change has become an existential threat and imperative for econutrition to be sustainable. The entire food system must be co-opted for our planetary habitability to be feasible. For nutritional biology to enable the food system to function requires it to have homeostatic, bioenergetic, inter-kingdom genomic and epigenetic, microbiomic, alimentary, sensing and immunoinflammatory facets. These have not only biomedical, but also environmental, societal and economic dimensions. Plant-based food systems need to support food patterns stepwise from origin to household or other eating situations and with circularity. These steps should not compromise sustainable livelihoods. Plants may form the basis of eating patterns in various ways, but it is their biodiversity, reflective of underlying ecosystems and kindred services, that determines their obligate contribution to human diets, given our biological embedment in the natural world and its cosmology. We are omnivores, whose good governance and the operation of the Commons are paramount for nourishment and survival.
Keywords
econutrition, sustainable diets, food systems, biodiversity, nutrition, planetary health
Document Type
Book Chapter
Date of Publication
7-10-2026
Publication Title
Food Chemistry, Function and Analysis: The Science of Plant-based Diets in Human Health
Publisher
Royal Society of Chemistry
School
Nutrition and Health Innovation Research Institute / School of Medical and Health Sciences
RAS ID
100021
Copyright
subscription content
Recommended Citation
Wahlqvist, M. L., Zhong, L., & Huang, Y.-C. (2026). Sustainable nourishment and livelihoods: Optimising plant-based food and health systems. In D. Li (Ed.), Food chemistry, function and analysis: The science of plant-based diets in human health (pp. 98-139). Royal Society of Chemistry. https://doi.org/10.1039/9781837678907-00098