Healthy diets, cultures and traditions

Monday, 24th July, 09:30-11:00

Diets are not only the sum of foods they are made up of. They reflect a much larger perspective – involving cultural, social, economic, environmental, and health aspects. Traditional diets are rooted in the territory, ecosystems and the local community where they are consumed. The Mediterranean Diet is an example of traditional diet that safeguard individual and collective health, respect nature, valorize local traditions, and promote business development, social equity, and prosperity. The objective of the session is to show the importance of traditional healthy diets in addressing the challenges of malnutrition and in acting as a catalyst for transitioning food systems towards resilience and sustainability.

Traditional food systems are maintained especially by local communities, who retain knowledge of the local agroecosystems. This leads to the perseverance of specific food cultures within their regions. Such patterns are observed in various parts of the world, particularly some rural communities still cherish their traditions including their food systems, which are indeed their intangible natural and cultural heritage. However, several factors are causing lower adherence to traditional food cultures, including population pressures, urbanization, and climate change. Many of these changes are not for the better.

The session will focus on the following questions:

How can traditional diets protect and revitalize agrifood systems, including their communities, cultures, environments, and business models?
What are the lessons and the best practices that we can learn from the Mediterranean Diet, which is the only traditional diet recognized as (UNESCO Intangible Heritage of Humanity)?

The session will focus particularly on the lessons learned from the Mediterranean Diet. Special enphasis will be put on the role that territories and local entities have to valorize and preserve the various forms of Mediterranean Diet; then, it will highlight how can civil society organizations, the private sector, chefs and farmers’ organizations promote and enable preservation of the Mediterranean Diet from production to consumption.