Future challenges for fruit and vegetable quality: what role should it play at the intersection of the environment and nutrition?

Professionals’ commitment to sustainable development means that every product or service must, in particular, address environmental and nutritional issues. Environmental quality and nutritional quality therefore stand out as distinguishing features and offer added value in a highly competitive market. Here, we focus our discussion on the relationship between the environment and nutrition at three levels. (i) At the level of what ends up on our plates: how our food choices have an environmental and nutritional impact; (ii) At the level of supply systems: which sectors have the greatest impact; (iii) How can we combine or reconcile ‘nutrition, environment and social considerations’? This analysis shows that (i) across the four alternatives – ‘animal products versus plant products’, ‘organic versus conventional’, ‘local versus international’, and ‘in-season versus out-of-season products’ – we face controversies regarding environmental impact because the production method is often a more decisive factor than distance or the nature of the product; (ii) agriculture and consumer practices are the two areas with the greatest environmental impact; industry and consumer practices have the greatest nutritional impact, and (iii) putting the partial results into perspective should enable a balance to be struck between considerations that are sometimes contradictory.