What we eat has a direct impact not only on our health, but also on the wellbeing and prosperity of our communities and our planet.
This is a lesson we learnt at a young age at our parents’ family restaurant, and one that we now try to spread from the kitchen at our restaurant El Celler de Can Roca and in our new role as Goodwill Ambassadors for the Sustainable Development Goals Fund.
Fighting hunger and malnutrition, and improving access for all people to a healthy diet, is a central component of the Sustainable Development Goals.
Achieving the goal of Zero Hunger by 2030, and making sure all people – especially children – have access to sufficient and nutritious food all year round will be a challenge. Currently nearly 800 million people suffer from chronic malnutrition, and there are nearly 100 million children under five in developing countries that are underweight. This is a terrible reality, and one that must be fixed, on the farm, in the kitchen and at the table.
As our global population grows, we find a global food system that is unsustainable, that consumes too much land, too much water, generates too many greenhouse gases and overexploits marine resources.
To make things even more complicated, climate change impacts threaten to undermine these food systems, particularly in the poorest communities that depend directly on the land to feed their families.
In this complex landscape, sustainable cooking can contribute to bringing about real and very positive change. It is cooking built on sustainable agriculture, small local producers and traditional production and conservation techniques. It allows us to access more varied and nutritional food that is more resilient to changing climate conditions, reclaim ingredients that have been all but forgotten and generate less waste.
Support for local producers and family farms is particularly crucial in rural areas of many developing countries, as it drives economic growth and provides employment opportunities, while providing resilience to shocks and climatic changes.
On a larger scale, facing these challenges means supporting vulnerable farmers with the tools and training they need to grow better crops, sell their produce on the local market and build better lives for their families and future generations. This will require integrated support at local, national and international levels to ensure equitable access to land, technology and markets, and encourage international cooperation to invest in the infrastructure and knowledge necessary for improved agricultural productivity in the face of climate change.
UNDP is taking a leading stance in addressing the sustainability of food systems and is supporting smallholder farmers to increase their resilience. To highlight this work, the “Adaptive Farms, Resilient Tables” cookbook features traditional recipes in six diverse project countries (Cabo Verde, Cambodia, Haiti, Mali, Niger and Sudan), all supported by the Canada-UNDP Climate Change Adaptation Facility. These recipes highlight how climate change is impacting the ingredients, and how the adaptation activities are making them more sustainable.
The book sheds light on how local producers and consumers are productively and positively adapting to climate change by modifying their culinary and agricultural practices. We must celebrate these efforts to strengthen resilience and enhance food security by following these examples and continuously striving to set a sustainable table.
Bon profit!
The Roca Brothers
About the Authors
Food has always been a central part of the lives of master chefs and brothers Joan, Josep and Jordi Roca, who spent most of their lives in their parents’ restaurant. Coinciding with the launch of the Sustainable Development Goals in January 2016, they are embarking on a new journey together with the United Nations Development Programme and the Sustainable Development Goals Fund (SDG Fund) as Goodwill Ambassadors. To learn more and participate in the campaign, please visit: www.sdgfund.org/sustainablecooking.