The Solution to Sustainable Eating Is Not a One-Way Street

Abstract

By 2050 the Earth has to feed a population approaching 10 billion. The recent report from the EAT-Lancet Commission on Healthy Diets from Sustainable Food Systems This change involves a diet with much more plant-based food than now, including 500 g vegetables and fruit every day and little or no red meat. It is well-known that most people have difficulties eating that much green. The barriers to eating enough vegetables and fruit may be of both psychological, physiological, social, and cultural nature. In addition, plant-based food is lacking in the basic tastes sweet and umami that humans over evolutionary time scales have been primed to crave Without confronting these fundamental facts, we may fail in providing for a more green and sustainable future for the planet. In the present Opinion we propose a solution to meet these challenges by the adoption of a holistic flexitarian approach shaped by fundamental insight into taste, and in particular, how to sustain sweetness and umami in a green diet, using only minimal sources from the animal kingdom.

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