1

Introduction

On July 22–23, 2020, the Food Forum of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine hosted a virtual workshop that explored integration of the health, societal, economic, and environmental effects and future needs of the food system. Planning committee chair Naomi Fukagawa, U.S. Department of Agriculture, provided opening remarks on the goals of the workshop and the Food Forum. She described the main objective of the 1.5-day workshop as understanding how to achieve a more sustainable, resilient, equitable, and nourishing food system.

The workshop opened with introductory remarks on new expectations for the food system (Chapter 2). The sessions that followed examined three main dimensions of the food system: vulnerabilities (Chapter 3), resiliency (Chapter 4), and transformation (Chapter 5). The workshop included discussions on global change, access to health care and food, resiliency in complex dynamic systems and resiliency for the future, and consumption- and production-oriented strategies for transforming the food system. The Statement of Task for the workshop is provided in Box 1-1.¹

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¹ The workshop planning committee’s role was limited to planning the workshop, and this Proceedings of a Workshop was prepared by an independent rapporteur as a factual summary of what occurred at the workshop. Statements, recommendations, and opinions expressed are those of independent presenters and participants, and are not necessarily endorsed or verified by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, nor should they be construed as reflecting any group consensus.

As Fukagawa noted, workshop presentations and discussions were intended to provoke and foster the exchange of thoughts and ideas and to offer insight into multisector solutions involving collaboration. Given that the workshop was held virtually, participants submitted questions for speakers online, and selected questions were read aloud by the session moderator.