Concurrent economic and environmental impacts of food consumption: are low emissions diets affordable?

Benvenuti, Luca; Santis, A. De; Sero, Andrea Di; Franco, Nicola

doi:10.1016/j.jclepro.2019.117645

Cited by 18 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 14 publications

(15 reference statements)

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“…The data about the nutritional parameter values of every dish have been computed from its ingredient using the food composition databases of the national agencies for food and drug. In particular, the Spanish database (51) was used in Ribal et al (34), the Italian database (52) in Benvenuti et al (35), and the French database (53) in Benvenuti et al (36). The data about the environmental impact parameter values have been assessed either from the literature dealing with life cycle assessment and studies into food products (34), or from available databases [the World Wide Fund for Nature database (54) 7 for CF and WF was used in Benvenuti et al (35), the Carbon Scope Data LCI database (57) was used in Benvenuti et al (36)].…”

Section: Source Of Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In particular, the Spanish database (51) was used in Ribal et al (34), the Italian database (52) in Benvenuti et al (35), and the French database (53) in Benvenuti et al (36). The data about the environmental impact parameter values have been assessed either from the literature dealing with life cycle assessment and studies into food products (34), or from available databases [the World Wide Fund for Nature database (54) 7 for CF and WF was used in Benvenuti et al (35), the Carbon Scope Data LCI database (57) was used in Benvenuti et al (36)]. The economic impact parameter values of every dish have been computed from the market prices of its ingredients; these prices were made available by local wholesalers or collecting them from a sample of local stores.…”

Section: Source Of Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The economic impact parameter values of every dish have been computed from the market prices of its ingredients; these prices were made available by local wholesalers or collecting them from a sample of local stores. Finally, the data about the constraints were retrieved from the Spanish literature (58) in Ribal et al (34) and from national institutions (10) in Benvenuti et al (35,36).…”

Section: Source Of Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As for the implementation and numerical solution of the BLP problem, several tools are available. In particular, LINGO© has been used in Ribal et al (34) and AMPL© in Benvenuti et al (35,36). Both of them integrate a proprietary language for expressing optimization models and provide several built-in solvers for linear, non-linear, and integer programming.…”

Section: Source Of Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The case study (36) consists of finding the optimal menus for nursing homes in Italy for a 14-days (7 days a week for 2 weeks) planning period. In this case, N M = 3, N D = 7, and N W = 2.…”

Section: Case 3: a 14-days Full-board Nursing Homes Meal Planmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Making a Sustainable Diet Acceptable: An Emerging Programming Model With Applications to Schools and Nursing Homes Menus

Benvenuti

Santis

2020

Front. Nutr.

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Background: Food consumption is one of the most important drivers of the relation between human well-being and Earth's ecosystems. The current production level is difficult to sustain without compromising environmental integrity or public health. This calls for a decisive change in food consumption patterns in order to improve nutrition quality while respecting biodiversity and ecosystems. This change will produce some effect only if it is also culturally acceptable, accessible, economically fair and affordable. The design of food plans is traditionally carried out using mathematical optimization models, such as linear programming. This method has proved to be successful in providing nutritionally adequate diets while minimizing their economic and environmental impact. Nevertheless, cultural habits as well as attractiveness and variety of meals is very difficult to deal with, and no fully satisfactory way to include these issues in linear programming has been found. Objective: The aim of this paper is to move from traditional linear programming to a new programming methodology in order to cope also with acceptability in the design of meal plans. Method: Binary integer linear programming is the new modeling paradigm. In the proposed model, meal plans consist of providing the sequence and composition of daily meals over a given period of time and each meal can be composed using dishes from a given set. Therefore, instead of defining just a level of consumption of food groups or food items, the proposed model provides a realistic menu. To cope with sustainability, the energy and nutritional content of each dish is calculated together with its price and environmental impact. Furthermore, acceptability can be explicitly taken into account in a very natural way, that is bounding the daily, weekly, or total repetitions of single dishes and of dishes in the same food groups. Results: The paper reviews three successful studies with increasing complexity considering lunch plans for schools and full-board menus for nursing homes. The case studies show a great reduction of the environmental impact of the meal plans while ensuring an adequate nutritional intake, affordable prices and most importantly the plans are varied and culturally acceptable.

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