# Introduction

Many discourses on food security have focused on feeding 9 billion people by 2050. Organisations such as the World Bank have picked up this challenge and directed their investment in agriculture to produce more food to feed more people (World Bank, 2012). The focus on increasing the production of food is now deep-rooted within food policy.

However, food security is more than just production, supply and consumption of food. In this free course, Eating for the environment, you will explore other dimensions of food security. These include the need to provide adequate and appropriate nutrition in addition to the quantity of food required to sustain a healthy human diet.

To sustain a healthy human diet, it is not just the quantity of food that is important, but adequate and appropriate nutrition is also essential. For over 800 million people in the world, access to sufficient and nutritious food is a serious problem (FAO et al., 2017). Even though the policies on food focus on feeding 9 billion people by 2050, in reality food is not distributed equally and some people have poorer access to food than others.

In addition to the accessibility of food, affordability is also important. However, for hundreds of millions of people in the world, the cost of sufficient and nutritious food can be prohibitive. In this course, you will explore how much a balanced dinner plate costs in different countries to examine how affordable nutritious food is to people from around the world.

Traditional, cultural and spiritual associations of food are also important, because food pervades deeply into the organisation of human society and the food you eat is strongly influenced by where you live. In this course you will explore a diversity of diets from around the world. Collectively, this course will highlight geographical differences in availability, access and affordability of sufficient and nutritious food.

This OpenLearn course is an adapted extract from the Open University course SDT306 Environment: responding to change.

OpenLearn - Eating for the environment
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