Editorial: Food systems for nutrition: converging economic, social, and environmental sustainability

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Abstract
The concept of food system transformation has gained traction in international policy discourse, most visibly through the 2021 UN Food Systems Summit and the Sustainable Development Goals framework. Yet rhetoric has frequently outpaced practice. The gap between ambitious global commitments and ground-level realities, whether on smallholder farms in Sub-Saharan Africa, in hospital kitchens in the Middle East, or in publicly funded nutrition programs in the United States, remains vast and, in many contexts, widening.Closing this gap requires not only better science but also better translation of science into policy and practice, including understanding why transformations succeed or fail in realworld contexts. This Research Topic, published across Frontiers in Nutrition and Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, was designed to advance precisely this transition. It invited interdisciplinary contributions that could not separate agricultural productivity from nutritional outcomes, economic incentives from social equity, or environmental sustainability from cultural acceptability. The response was both wide and substantive: 23 original articles from researchers and practitioners spanning six continents, employing methods as varied as dietary optimization modelling, multi-year household panel data analysis, participatory trait-preference surveys, laboratory-to-practice aquaculture engineering, qualitative clinicstaff interviews, and fifty-year historical analyses of agricultural production trends.Together, they constitute a genuinely integrated and internationally grounded contribution to the science and practice of sustainable food systems.The breadth of this collection is one of its strengths, but it warrants some navigational guidance. We have organized our discussion of the 23 contributions into four thematic groupings that reflect the major intellectual threads running through the collection. The first addresses the transformation of agricultural production itself: agroecological and regenerative approaches, the behavioral dimensions of farmer adoption, and innovative circular production systems. The second examines sustainable diets and food environments: dietary optimization and its trade-offs, the distributional costs of dietary transition, the environmental footprint of nutritional guidelines, and the structural and behavioral factors that shape what people actually eat. The third focuses on food loss and waste, both the quantified scale of institutional waste and the relational dynamics of waste reduction among food professionals. The fourth addresses governance, equity, and inclusive food policy across diverse contexts from the Pacific Island governance structures to medically tailored meal programs in the United States. These groupings are not watertight compartments; cross-cutting themes of gender equity, climate resilience, and economic accessibility run through all four. What they offer is orientation rather than partition.Agriculture is where food systems begin and where many of their most consequential tradeoffs are established. The seven contributions in this grouping examine how production practices, farmer motivations, and system designs can be reoriented toward outcomes that are simultaneously more nutritious and more ecologically sound, drawing on evidence from India, China, Malawi, West Africa, including one from China's aquaculture sector.Divyanshu and colleagues open the section with a field-level comparison of nature-friendly and conventional apple cultivation in Himachal Pradesh, India. Farms that had transitioned away from chemical-intensive inputs demonstrated healthier soil organic matter profiles, reduced disease incidence, and greater agro-biodiversity. The study is candid about transitional costs, yields, and revenues, and acknowledges that they face short-term pressure, but provides grounded evidence that ecological gains are achievable and that market linkages for premium, nature-friendly produce are a necessary complement to agronomic change. Rosier and colleagues broaden this perspective considerably in their review of regenerative agriculture, making the case that restoring soil health is a nutritional as much as an environmental imperative. Their evidence linking soil microbiome diversity to crop micronutrient density argues that the documented decline in nutrient density of many staple crops over recent decades reflects, in part, the depletion of soil biological communities under industrial farming. Their call for a unified but flexible certification framework for regenerative agriculture reflects the difficulty of scaling inherently contextspecific practices without losing their ecological integrity.The behavioral dimensions of agricultural transition receive rigorous attention from two complementary Chinese studies. Zhang, Mao, and colleagues examine how livelihood capital, including physical, human, financial, social, and natural, shapes green production behaviors among professional grain farmers in Jiangxi Province, while Zhang, Cai, and colleagues apply an integrated Technology Acceptance Model and Theory of PlannedBehavior framework to understand the psychological and normative drivers of farmers' willingness to cultivate high-quality rice. Together, they make the point that policy too often ignores: sustainable practice adoption is mediated by multiple forms of capital and subjective perceptions of ease, usefulness, and social expectations. Interventions attending only to the technical or economic dimensions of adoption are likely to disappoint.Munthali and colleagues contribute field evidence from Malawi, where conservation agriculture technologies, including crop rotation, intercropping, mulching, and no-till, have generated meaningful gains in food production and food security in Mzimba district, while candidly mapping the informational and economic barriers that continue to slow uptake.Mitchodigni and colleagues add a critical market...