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A sustainable food system is one of the causes that I care about, but haven't done much towards. I'll at least summarize a great research paper on the subject: "Food in the Anthropocene: the EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems" (free access too!!)

Context:

Providing a growing global population with healthy diets from sustainable food systems is an immediate challenge. Although global food production of calories has kept pace with population growth, more than 820 million people have insufficient food and many more consume low-quality diets that cause micronutrient deficiencies and contribute to a substantial rise in the incidence of diet-related obesity and diet-related non-communicable diseases, including coronary heart disease, stroke, and diabetes. Unhealthy diets pose a greater risk to morbidity and mortality than does unsafe sex, and alcohol, drug, and tobacco use combined.

Aka it's a quality and distribution issue, and a very big issue.

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The absence of scientific targets for achieving healthy diets from sustainable food systems has been hindering large-scale and coordinated efforts to transform the global food system.

Everyone's favourite management quotation: you can't manage what you can't measure. The target is based on the planetary boundary framework. The article also proposes a reference sustainable diet that will "provide major health benefits".

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The article recommends 5 strategies to achieve the required drastic and global change:

1. National & international commitment by "investment in public health information and sustainability education, and improved coordination between departments of health and environment" (I'm not optimistic on this one after what happened with the Paris Agreement)
2. Farm for healthy (both human and biodiversity) rather than quantity
3. Intensify agriculture in a sustainable way, aka not what we've been doing by inefficiently applying tons of water and fertilizer 
4. Not fuck up biodiversity (any more than what we've already done) by "strong and coordinated governance of land and oceans"
5. Minimum 50% reduction in food loss and waste

"However, this transformation will not be achieved without people changing how they view and engage with food systems."

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We've done well to increase food production to better some facets of life, but have shifted to an unhealthy diet, driven by "rapid urbanisation, increasing incomes, and inadequate accessibility of nutritious foods". This in turn is killing us and the planet. 

Some environmental stats (all quoted): 

• Agriculture occupies about 40% of global land, [13] and food production is responsible for up to 30% of global greenhouse-gas emissions [14] and 70% of freshwater use.[ 2,15]
• Conversion of natural ecosystems to croplands and pastures is the largest factor causing species to be threatened with extinction.[16]
• Overuse and misuse of nitrogen and phosphorus causes eutrophication and dead zones in lakes and coastal zones.[17] 
• Environmental burden from food production also includes marine systems. About 60% of world fish stocks are fully fished, more than 30% overfished, and catch by global marine fisheries has been declining since 1996. [18]

We also gotta preserve natural carbon sinks and turn our farmlands into carbon sinks if we want any chance of keeping global warming below 2˚.

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Food Consumption

This Bon Appetit article focuses on the reference diet, and also where I heard about this article. 

• Protein: 0.8g/kg body weight is a guideline, with vegetarian sources (soy, legumes, nuts) > poultry & fish > red meat. 1 or 2 servings of fatty fish a week seem to be good due to omega-3
• Dairy: pretty neutral, no need to consume dairy for calcium if diet is otherwise balanced
• Carbs: eat less of it (<60 and="" energy="" grains="" li="" of="" preferred="" total="" whole="">
• Fruits and vegetable: seem to be pretty good, the article recommends 300g veg and 200g fruits daily.
• Added fats: also seem to be pretty good if and only if they're unsaturated fats, aka more olive oil or rapeseed oil and less butter
• Sugar: article recommends less than 5% of total energy

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Food Production

• GHG: "The total estimate of all greenhouse-gas emissions from food production is 8·5–13·7 Gt of carbon dioxide equivalent per year." whereas the target set by the article is 5 Gt annually.
• Water: requires regional analysis. Interesting point about the conflict of interest between food sovereignty and balancing water use in different regions through trade. 
• Nitrogen & Phosphorous: require more efficient use, both in spatial distribution and also in closed loop systems
• Biodiversity: severely underrated. "habitat loss and fragmentation, particularly through human appropriation of land for food production, is the greatest driver of biodiversity loss"
• Land use: in relation to biodiversity "Globally, the net area for food production has remained constant since the mid-20th century. However, this trend masks the real picture because substantial reductions in agricultural land have occurred in temperate regions of Europe, Russia, and North America, whereas substantial expansion of agricultural land has occurred in biodiversity-rich tropics". The article proposes 13M sq. km of food production land use. 

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The next section of the article, "Achieving healthy diets from sustainable food systems" is quite heavy on the figures, which I won't steal. But the main points are:

• "grains, fruits, and vegetables have the lowest environmental effects per serving, and meat from ruminants the highest", while seafood is super variable
• "Vegan and vegetarian diets were associated with the greatest reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions and land use, [5,221] and vegetarian diets with the greatest reductions in water use. [219]". 
• Interesting point on how some crops are less nutritious when grown in an atmosphere with higher CO2 concentrations (Panel 5)
• Hitting the biodiversity target will require the most ambitious of changes. But there's again a conflict between biodiversity and food sovereignty: 

We found that adopting the reference diet (or one of its variations) could increase the global number of extinctions if land-use change occurs in areas of food production. This effect is mainly a result of increased caloric intake to 2500 kcal / capita per day in the reference diet in countries where caloric intake is lower than this value, and shifting production priorities to produce crops (eg, nuts and pulses) needed to support the reference diet. However, these results assume that domestic production will meet a proportion of the additional demand. Rebalancing regional production on the basis of biodiversity concerns could mitigate those additional stresses and have the greatest effect on reducing biodiversity loss (figure 6). [144,206]