Today’s global food systems present complex, interlinked health and sustainability challenges. Shifting dietary behaviour is therefore a key lever for addressing these problems by tackling, for example, non-communicable diseases, environmental degradation and climate change.

PLAN’EAT is a Horizon Europe project that seeks to facilitate the transition towards healthy and sustainable dietary behaviour through an in-depth understanding of the underlying factors and drivers and the development of innovative, effective recommendations, tools and interventions addressing different agri-food system actors.

PLAN’EAT aims to implement a systemic approach at the macro (food system), meso (food environment) and micro (individual) levels. Various socio-cultural and geographic contexts across Europe will be considered by implementing nine living labs in different European areas, five pan-European food value chain consultation and working groups, and national and pan-European policy labs.

As part of a consortium of 24 partners, TMG is leading work on True Cost Accounting (TCA) to analyze the environmental, socio-economic and health impacts of European diets and their associated costs. This component of the project includes:

• analyzing the availability of TCA data

• developing a database of the impacts and true costs of 2,000+ food products consumed in Europe

• assessing the true costs of three different European dietary patterns

• providing recommendations for using TCA for holistic food systems policy and the development of national dietary guidelines

Building on this work, TMG will also be involved in developing a roadmap for the establishment of a proposed European Food Policy Council, as well as setting up a methodology framework to design easy-to-understand healthy and sustainable food-system-based dietary guidelines at the national level, for various population groups.

With funding from the European Commission, the members of the PLAN'EAT consortium are:

Council for Agricultural Research and Economics, Wageningen University, Justus-Liebig-Universität, European Food Information Council, Foundation for Environmental Education, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna, Hopscotch Season, Environmental Social Science Research Group, Technical University of Munich, Fundació per a la Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, European Public Health Alliance, Spread European Safety, Institut national de recherche pour l'agriculture, l'alimentation et l'environnement, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, University College Dublin, Fondazione ICONS, Jagiellonian University, Zuidelijke Land en Tuinbouw Organisatie, Charokopeio panepistimio (Harokopio University), Ethniko kentro erevnas kai technologikis anaptyxis, Hungarian Hospitality Employers’ Association - VIMOSZ, Euroquality