China’s transition towards sustainable food systems requires coherent policies

Research into global and regional food systems has shown that supplying healthy diets through sustainable food systems is necessary and theoretically feasible. Our perspective is that the research focus should now shift from analyzing food systems to studying how to design, test, and optimize coherent food policies, and how to implement them effectively in practice. China exemplifies both the urgency and the difficulty of this shift. Its food system has achieved mixed success in meeting nutrition, human health, and environmental sustainability goals. The majority of Chinese laws and policies in key food system domains address specific components of the system but fail to consider their interconnected nature. We present a proposal for a coherent set of policy interventions across food production, provision, and consumption. We also emphasize the need for investments in coherent policy formulation, and in implementing and testing differentiated but coherent food system policies.