One of the key aims of LiveWell for LIFE was to establish a foundation for change: to shape the building blocks needed to support a transition towards sustainable diets.
We worked with the Network of European Food Stakeholders to identified the key social and economic opportunities and barriers to adopt healthy, sustainable diets. These – together with the LiveWell Plates – helped us identify EU public policy options and pathways for practical implementation to facilitate this change across the EU.
Opportunities and barriers
In order to have a fruitful discussion on sustainable food consumption and production it was important to find common ground on how these diets can become the norm in different European socio-economic contexts.
With this in mind, LiveWell for LIFE and the Network of European Food Stakeholders, worked to identify the key opportunities for and barriers to adopting the LiveWell Plates in Spain, France and Sweden as well as the wider European Union. A consensus on the top six opportunities and barriers was achieved at our second stakeholder workshop held in Brussels in March 2013.
Opportunities | Invest in health | People |
Saving money | People | |
Meeting societal expectations | Business | |
Barriers | Limited knowledge / confusion | People |
Habits | People | |
Costs | People |
Policies and pathways
The final building blocks in our foundation for change were to determine possible EU policy options and develop tangible pathways to adopt sustainable diets.
LiveWell for LIFE commissioned the Institute for European Environmental Policy to identify a range of available and feasible EU policy options. The Network of European Food Stakeholders developed pathways towards the adoption of sustainable diets through a series of meetings in the pilot countries. Both the policy options and the pathways were discussed further at our third and final workshop held in Brussels in June 2014.