Messaging about healthy and sustainable food choices — buying local, the best diets, the cost of nutritious food — can feel overwhelming. These pieces can “seem like everything when they’re a super tiny piece of everything,” said Jack Bobo, executive director of the UCLA Rothman Family Institute for Food Studies.
The Rothman Food Institute partners with UCLA campus departments and the surrounding community to forge connections and evolve food systems, with the goal of translating local and regional knowledge into global health impact. UCLA’s research across policy issues and programs like the Semel Healthy Campus Initiative and UCLA Dining Services, which emphasizes food waste reduction and plant-based menu options, offer insights that can be incorporated into food service programs, schools and individual diets across the country.
Bobo, who wrote “Why Smart People Make Bad Food Choices: The Invisible Influences That Guide Our Thinking,” spoke with Newsroom about our food system’s impact on the environment and people, and how and where we can find solutions that make a difference.
Agriculture and farming are more sustainable now. More is needed
Farming practices since the 1980s improved dramatically in many areas, from fewer greenhouse gas emissions to improvements in water and energy expenditures, said Bobo, an Indiana native who previously served as director of the University of Nottingham’s Food Systems Institute and as a senior advisor for global food policy at the U.S. State Department. But immense challenges remain:
- At least 40% of all the land on Earth is currently dedicated to agriculture, which accounts for about 70% of all freshwater withdrawals.
- The Colorado River no longer consistently flows to the sea, largely because of the agricultural withdrawals.
- 10% to 15% of greenhouse gases come directly from agriculture and another 10% to 15% from deforestation — 80% of which is driven by agriculture.
- The world needs 25% to 75% more food by 2050 to feed a growing population. Around 9 million people die every year of hunger-related illnesses, or about 1,000 people every hour.
“The sustainability story gets complicated because there’s not one definition of sustainability,” Bobo said. Fewer inputs like pesticides and fertilizers might cause less local harm and promote biodiversity but result in less food produced; intensive farming systems might cause local impacts like nutrient runoff while producing food that feeds more people and reducing pressure on distant forests.
“Instead of looking at them as good or bad, or right or wrong, it’s just a continuum of sustainability from local sustainability to global sustainability and there will always be trade-offs between those two,” he said. “As society, the question is where should we take a lighter touch and where can we afford to be more intensive? In general, I think consumers should recognize that there are going to be these trade-offs.”
Diets that aren’t working for people
The U.S. spends around $1.1 trillion per year to treat diet-related diseases, according to the Rockefeller Foundation, and the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization estimates the global cost of our food system is $10 trillion to $12 trillion.
“People are spending billions of dollars on diets that just aren’t working for them,” Bobo said. “We’ve never really known more about health and nutrition, and we’ve never been more obese. We’ve never had more choices or better nutrition labeling in our grocery stores and yet the problem has never been worse. How can that be?”
It boils down to our culture and food environment, he says. People in the 1960s knew less about health and nutrition, and the fruits and vegetables they ate weren’t very diverse.
“It wasn’t so much people making good choices that kept them healthy back then. Our culture didn’t deliver obesity,” he said. “It’s not a failure of individuals … it’s not because people are trying to do the wrong thing. It is the food environment in which we live that is driving these outcomes.”
Studies show that diets based on whole-food, plant-based options can prevent multiple chronic medical conditions. But buying and preparing such foods may not be practical for everyone.
“If you’re on a fixed budget, it’s so much more stressful to go to the grocery store because you’re doing a lot of math,” Bobo said. “You’re looking at the can, you’re looking at the size and you’re looking at the price per ounce. That leads to decision fatigue … everything in a grocery store is designed to maximize the value to the grocery store, not to improve your health.”
This is a nexus of food production, diet and climate impacts. For some, choices might be relatively easy to incorporate. But whether it’s a neighbor or someone halfway around the globe, the landscape is entirely different.
“If the main message is eat whole foods, mostly plants, does that mean most low-income people are failing their kids? And does that mean that we double food waste?” Bobo asked. “The more whole foods we eat, the more waste we have. So it might start with eat more whole foods, then we eat foods that are less processed that have longer shelf lives, that could be frozen or canned. And then the ultra-processed food would play a smaller part in our diet and we should reduce those where we can — as opposed to ‘eliminate them’ and know people aren’t actually going to do it. What we don’t want to do is stigmatize individuals who are doing the best they can for their families, often with limited time and money.”
Future foods and alternative proteins
UCLA’s Future of Food Fellows program, led by biophysicist and Rothman Food Institute faculty director Amy Rowat, is researching solutions in cellular agriculture, an emerging industry that is developing ways to scale accessible and sustainable food systems. Its inaugural cohort for 2024–25 received state funds for research and development of cultured meat.
“I think sometimes people feel like these alternative proteins are trying to undermine our traditional foods, and I think part of it is putting it into perspective,” Bobo said. “We need 25% to 75% more protein and more food by 2050. We’re probably not going to get there by doubling the number of livestock on the planet — we have to find a way of meeting that future need so that people can be sustainably and nutritiously fed without cutting down another 10% or 20% of our forests.”
Whether people in the U.S. consume more or less animal protein, the alternatives mean more protein will be available throughout the world.
Local, glocal and California’s environmental footprint
Buying locally grown food, or food that travels fewer “food miles” — the distance between where something is produced to where it’s eaten — might be easier for people in California, where a third of the country’s vegetables and over three-quarters of the country’s fruits and nuts are grown. But the bigger picture stretches beyond how far food travels before it reaches your plate. Greenhouse gas emissions are a small slice of sustainable food production.
Food miles may be a decent measure of sustainability in California but not for many parts of the U.S., Bobo says. “On the other hand, there are huge benefits of local production that go beyond sustainability because you’re also supporting the local economy,” he said. “There are socioeconomic benefits and cultural benefits of purchasing locally, because the kinds of crops that you produce here in California might be different than what you would produce in the Southeast.”
So it’s important to consider all these factors instead of looking for winners and losers, he says: “We need to make sure that the sustainability of the food we produce gets better every year and gets better faster every year.”
Protecting people and the planet
Despite improvements in farming practices, the reality is that farmers are being asked to produce more food to feed even more people — creating a situation where we only see the impacts, not the improvement. But it doesn’t mean there’s a dearth of progress.
“In general, things are not bad and getting worse,” Bobo said. “They’re good and getting better — but not fast enough. Instead of asking people to sacrifice for the future, we should be asking them to embrace the future. I think that’s more hopeful, and it reflects a hundred years of innovation and advancement.”
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