Can Fixing Dinner Fix the Planet?

How can consumers, nations, and international organizations work together to improve food systems before our planet loses its ability to sustain itself and its people?

Do we have the right to eat wrongly?

As the world's agricultural, environmental, and nutritional needs intersect—and often collide—how can consumers, nations, and international organizations work together to reverse the damage by changing how we make, distribute, and purchase food? Can such changes in practice and policy reverse the trajectories of the biggest global crises impacting our world: the burden of chronic diseases, the consequences of climate change, and the systemic economic and social inequities that exist within and among nations?

Can Fixing Dinner Fix the Planet? is a clarion call for both individual consumers and those who shape our planet's food and environmental policies that:

• describes the often destructive path that foods take from farms and seas through their processing, distribution, marketing, purchasing and waste management sites
• explores the complex web of factors impacting our ability to simultaneously meet nutritional needs, sustain biodiversity and protect the environment
• raises readers' food and environmental literacy through an engaging narrative about Fanzo's research on five continents along with the work of other inspiring global experts who are providing solutions to these crises
• empowers readers to contribute to immediate and long-term changes by informing their decisions in restaurants, grocery stores, farmers markets, and kitchens

“If you're looking for a guide through the tangled thickets of global food systems, you can do no better than Jess Fanzo's book Can Fixing Dinner Fix the Planet? .”

If you're looking for a guide through the tangled thickets of global food systems, you can do no better than Jess Fanzo's book Can Fixing Dinner Fix the Planet?.
—Eat This Podcast
Overall, the book provides an insightful and convincing overview for anyone interested in food and sustainability.
—L. A. Reisch, F. C. Doebbe, Journal of Consumer Policy
Fanzo's position as an expert and thought leader in global food systems brings a balanced, informed, comprehensive approach to the text often missing in food policy books.
—Journal of Public Health Policy

Jessica Fanzo is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor and the director of the Global Food Ethics and Policy Program at Johns Hopkins University. She previously held positions at Columbia University, the Earth Institute, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the UN World Food Programme, Bioversity International, and the Millennium Development Goal Centre at the World Agroforestry Center in Kenya. She is a frequent contributor to media outlets including NPR, the New York Times, Reuters, and the Wall Street Journal.

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.

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