Review of the sustainability of food systems and transition using the Internet of Food

Abstract

Many current food systems are unsustainable because they cause significant resource depletion and unacceptable environmental impacts. This problem is so severe, it can be argued that the food eaten today is equivalent to a fossil resource. The transition to sustainable food systems will require many changes but of particular importance will be the harnessing of internet technology, in the form of an ‘Internet of Food’, which offers the chance to use global resources more efficiently, to stimulate rural livelihoods, to develop systems for resilience and to facilitate responsible governance by means of computation, communication, education and trade without limits of knowledge and access. A brief analysis of the evidence of resource depletion and environmental impact associated with food production and an outline of the limitations of tools like life cycle assessment, which are used to quantify the impact of food products, indicates that the ability to combine data across the whole system from farm to human will be required in order to design sustainable food systems. Developing an Internet of Food, as a precompetitive platform on which business models can be built, much like the internet as we currently know it, will require agreed vocabularies and ontologies to be able to reason and compute across the vast amounts of data that are becoming available. The ability to compute over large amounts of data will change the way the food system is analysed and understood and will permit a transition to sustainable food systems.

Food Informatics—Review of the Current State-of-the-Art, Revised Definition, and Classification into the Research Landscape

“…Somewhat contrarily, other authors describe the use of IoT for food-related purposes rather than the identification aspect as the Internet of Food; an example being smart refrigerators [18]. Holden et al [19] review current developments in the area of the Internet of Food with a focus on the support of sustainability.…”

Conceptual Framework for the Research on Quality of Life

“…Additionally, governments will have to deal with the task of being able to preserve biodiversity and the environment. The sustainable development goals established by the UN also focus on a number of critical global issues that are intimately related to the need to transition from global food systems and fossil food supply to sustainable production and consumption [35]. Specifically, Goal 2 (Zero hunger), Goal 12 (Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns), and Goal 13 (Climate action) proposed by the UN are the ones that are consistent with the need to achieve food security, sustainable production and consumption.…”

Reducing the Carbon Footprint of the Bucharest University of Economic Studies through Green Facades in an Economically Efficient Manner

“…The transition to this new paradigm is pushing the responsibility downwards on the social pyramid. At the moment, the pollution issue is no longer an abstract concept for the small businesses or for the individual, since every economic unit is fully and directly accountable for the carbon footprint level [24].…”