Diets, Food-Miles, and Environmental Sustainability of Urban Food Systems: Analysis of Nine Indian Cities

A sufficient and reliable food system is necessary to support any population. With an ever-growing urban population, expected at 2/3 of the world's population by 2050, cities are growing to understand the importance of ensuring a well -functioning food system. Yet, despite the growing interest of cities for their food systems, the state of knowledge remains rather limited across the system. City-food demand usually relies on national scale data, without acknowledging inter-city variation and with few studies reporting city food supply chain data—information needed to both assess risk and disaggregate environmental impact.

In light of the challenges facing urban food system sciences, this paper advances the understanding of urban food systems, by analyzing the unique food systems of nine cities within the country of India, through the connection of multiple, city-specific data sources including demand data for residents, visitors and industries, and commodity specific supply chains. This allows for the first-time cross city examination of diets and nutrition, distribution of city community-wide demand by end users (residents, visitors, industry), supply chains and associated 'food-miles' for each city with disaggregated environmental impact to better understand the areas upon which cities are reliant to support their respective food supplies. The nine cities comprise a population of 44.5 million people. This analysis fills an important gap of the relatively understudied Indian urban food system. Such an analysis is necessary to begin improving a system to better address the needs of the 70% of households lacking sufficient calories (Government of India reported) in the context of rapid urbanization and depleting natural resources.