Sustainable Gastronomy: Bringing Back Local Flavors to Build Resilient Food Systems

Food, Flavor, and Futures: Developing the Gastronomy Impact Framework (GIF) for Sustainable Food Futures

Industrialized and globalized food systems have reduced the diversity of food practices and ingredients. While over 30,000 edible plant species exist, four crops (wheat, rice, maize, and potato) account for more than 60% of human energy intake. This narrowing undermines climate resilience, nutritional diversity, and cultural heritage (Knez et al., 2024).

At a Swiss level, recent evidence confirms this erosion:

• OFAG (2023): steady decline in dietary diversity, with increasing dependence on imports.
• Agroscope (2022): disappearance of heritage crops (rye, millet, Alpine legumes) from commercial chains.
• Fondation pour la sauvegarde des traditions culinaires suisses (2021): loss of traditional recipes and reduced intergenerational food knowledge transfer.

Gastronomy (understood here as the sustainable production, preparation, commercialization, and cultural meaning of food) connects ecological, social, and cultural dimensions in ways that remain underexplored in participatory innovation research. While many sustainability projects exist (food waste, regional agriculture, alternative proteins), they largely overlook the integrative dimension of gastronomy as a systemic lever for the transition of food systems towards sustainability.

The project will serve as a pilot to:

1. document overlooked ingredients (i.e., ingredients beyond the four dominant global staples (wheat, rice, maize, potato) and those already mainstream in retail and foodservice chains) and practices through interviews, food mapping, and participatory workshops;
2. co-create and test ~12 prototype recipes with 3 concept sheets capturing feasibility (taste, prep flow, indicative costs, sourcing, HACCP) and social relevance;
3. validate these outputs with partners (i.e., Alter Start Food) in real-world culinary and training settings; and
4. consolidate methods into an open-access GIF Toolkit (facilitation protocols, feasibility checklists, templates) to enable replication. The GIF is intended for subsequent deployment of social gastronomy labs in diverse regions.