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Our food production system is unsustainable and threatening planetary boundaries. Yet, a quarter of the global population still lacks access to safe and nutritious food, while suboptimal diets account for 11 million adult deaths per year. This Voices asks: what critical barriers must be overcome to enable sustainable, healthy, accessible, and equitable diets for all?

Gender is a hidden driver of inequality in diets
Inequality in diets is deeply associated with the structural problems of gender at all levels including global food systems, household resource allocation, food policies, and research priorities. For example, global food production and processing depend heavily on women’s ‘‘cheap’’ labor characterized by low wage and precarious form of employment. Ironically, these women workers cannot afford healthy and sustainable diets for themselves. At the household level, women do not necessarily have decisionmaking power and the economic resources to invest in healthy diets for their children. This is also closely associated with the structural inequality persisting in their societies. Furthermore, in food policies and governance, gender is often addressed by merely inviting more women into the existing unequal food system rather than substantively introducing structural change. Gender is also sidelined in mainstream research on food systems and diets that focus more on how, rather than for whom, food was produced and distributed.

To address these underlying structural issues, I suggest three actions: (1) embracing pluralistic knowledge production in our understandings of food systems and diets by inviting other disciplines such as feminist approaches in political sciences, anthropology, and cultural studies; (2) analyzing policy-making processes to understand how and why the agenda on gender is marginalized and depoliticized; and (3) involving more women and early-career scientists from the Global South in food system research to incorporate their perspectives in food system theories, concepts, and practices. These are the first step to moving beyond providing technological solutions toward facilitating structural transformation in food systems and food system research.