Data Integration for Diet Sustainability Analyses

Diet sustainability analyses are stronger when they incorporate multiple food systems domains, disciplines, scales, and time/space dimensions into a common modeling framework. Few analyses do this well: there are large gaps in food systems data in many regions, accessing private and some public data...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Sustainability 2021-07, Vol.13 (14), p.8082
Main Authors: Conrad, Zach, Stern, Alexandra, Love, David C., Salesses, Meredith, Cyril, Ashley, McDowell, Acree, Blackstone, Nicole Tichenor
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Agricultural economics
Agricultural resources
Agricultural wastes
Analytical methods
Data integration
Data sources
Datasets
Diet
Domains
Food
Food prices
Food products
Food security
Food waste
Integration
Linkages
Nutrients
Nutrition
Nutrition research
Sustainability
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Summary:Diet sustainability analyses are stronger when they incorporate multiple food systems domains, disciplines, scales, and time/space dimensions into a common modeling framework. Few analyses do this well: there are large gaps in food systems data in many regions, accessing private and some public data can be difficult, and there are analytical challenges, such as creating linkages across datasets and using complex analytical methods. This article summarizes key data sources across multiple domains of food system sustainability (nutrition, economic, environment) and describes methods and tools for integrating them into a common analytic framework. Our focus is the United States because of the large number of publicly available and highly disaggregated datasets. Thematically, we focus on linkages that exist between environmental and economic datasets to nutrition, which can be used to estimate the cost and agricultural resource use of food waste, interrelationships between healthy eating and climate impacts, diets optimized for cost, nutrition, and environmental impacts, and others. The limitations of these approaches and data sources are described next. By enhancing data integration across these fields, researchers can be better equipped to promote policy for sustainable diets.
ISSN:2071-1050
2071-1050
DOI:10.3390/su13148082