Can Fixing Dinner Fix the Planet?

Our diets are the products of massive, interconnected, and complex food systems that extend from the seedlings in a farmer's field to the global processing, distribution, and marketing networks that deliver our food. These systems have direct and substantial impacts on the planet's natural resources, the nutrition of individuals and populations, the composition of the atmosphere, workforces, and social and gender equity. In addition, individual dietary decisions impact those food systems—we're all participants in a global food system that affects every person and nation on earth. Given these interconnections, consumers and nations can no longer afford to eat thoughtlessly, and nations no longer have the right to shift blame.

In Can Fixing Dinner Fix the Planet? Jessica Fanzo explores the interactions among food systems, diets, human health, and the climate crisis. Drawing upon her decades of hands-on research projects in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas, Fanzo describes how food systems must evolve to promote healthy, sustainable, and equitable diets. By sharing new ideas and successful examples of programs and policies, she offers hope that there are ways forward and describes the individual and systemic changes that we all must make to slow and ultimately reverse catastrophic trends.

Can Fixing Dinner Fix the Planet? is a wake-up call for individual consumers and those who shape the food and environmental policies of nations. We can prevent future calamities and change the trajectories of the biggest global crises impacting our twenty-first-century world: the burden of chronic diseases, the consequences of climate change, and the systemic economic and social inequities that exist within and among nations.

Features

• Explores the complex web of factors that impact the global food system's ability to both provide for nutritional needs and sustain biodiversity and the environment, including climate-related natural disasters, political policies, and population pressures;
• Raises readers' food systems and environmental literacy through an approachable narrative with specific examples;
• Features sections that underscore key takeaways;
• Includes contributions from the world's leading minds through their research findings and quotations;
• Guides readers about what can be done at an individual level;
• Includes inspiring stories of effective efforts around the world, from Chile's successful front-of-packaging nutritional warning campaign to Mali's COFERSA cooperative of women agroecological farmers to Nepal's government efforts to eliminate undernutrition among Nepalese children.

Johns Hopkins Wavelengths

In classrooms, field stations, and laboratories in Baltimore and around the world, the Bloomberg Distinguished Professors of Johns Hopkins University are opening the boundaries of our understanding of many of the world's most complex challenges. The Johns Hopkins Wavelengths book series brings readers inside their stories of accomplishment, inspiration, and obstacles, illustrating how their groundbreaking discoveries and tireless efforts benefit people in their neighborhoods and across the globe in public health, space exploration, food systems, urban economics, and other salient, critical, and fascinating arenas of study. Through these accessible and compelling narratives, their insights will spark conversations from dorm rooms to dining rooms to boardrooms.