14 Summary of Part 3

In Part 3, you began with Chapter 11 answering the question “What are some ways to integrate SFS into practice?” by exploring the Seven Strategies for Advancing Sustainable Dietary Patterns: Leverage Points for Nutrition and Dietetics Professionals. The Seven Strategies introduced you to the socioecological systems that impact dietary habits. These systems were used to organise the seven strategies/leverage points to help D-N find strategies that fit into their practice.

Then, in Chapter 12, you explored case studies and examples of the ways in which other nutrition and dietetics professionals are incorporating sustainable food systems into their practice.

Examples include:

• National School Lunch Program Japan (2025)
• Addressing Food Waste at University College Dublin, Ireland (2025)
• Community Kitchens: Responding to Crisis in South African Township: Community innovation for nutritious food in the time of COVID-19 (2025)

There are a number of excellent tools and resources available to support many of the above activities, and more. Chapter 13 presented numerous; examples include:

• Planetary Health Report Card: Curriculum Metrics Tips for Data Collection
• The Marine Stewardship Council’s ‘What is Sustainable Fishing?’
• FOODPathS Toolkit

The Canadian role paper, presented in Part 2, also provides specific examples for action in various practice areas, including:

• Become structurally competent to identify and address health inequities
• Seek to understand others’ worldviews
• Identify and work with partners working across food systems
• Address, where appropriate, common myths about sustainable food systems
• Consider both nutritional and environmental science in order to give advice
• Advocate for economic incentives that recognise the value of ecological goods and services provided by farmers, fishers and ranchers
• Support food initiatives and structures that help diversify the scale within existing food systems (25,27)
• Establish a sustainability management team that includes members from multidisciplinary backgrounds

The International Confederation of Dietetics Associations has many materials collated for your reference that cover topics and examples to help guide you. The ICDA’s Food Sustainability Initiatives Sustainable Food Systems Page is available online.

Your career is, of course, your own journey, and we encourage you to think of sustainability as a lens through which you look, rather than a particular set of dietary guidelines or actions you must add to your workload.