Introducing the Food Value Framework (FVF) to empower transdisciplinary research and unite stakeholders in their efforts of building a sustainable global food system

The global food system provides numerous benefits to humanity but also faces critical sustainability challenges with respective costs often burdened by society. As these costs are not sufficiently represented in market prices, increasing monetization efforts of externalities aim to reveal such hidden costs. However, monetary evaluation approaches have limitations such as conformity or including arguably unmonetizable impacts. Given that food production and consumption have been deeply embedded in human culture and behavior throughout millennia, systemic change is generally slow and precarious to enforce externally, especially given its existential role for daily survival. Rather than imposing relatively recent sustainability challenges, such as climate change, onto food systems, we hence suggest incorporating them into a core natural driver of human behavior: values. The objective of this research is to create a framework that can holistically address values associated with food in order to guide and unite stakeholders along the food value chain. Based on this human-centered bottom-up approach, empirical relevance of a respective framework to successfully translate into and guide sustainability efforts should be increased. We therefore combined established approaches of monetary accounting with a psychosocial perspective on basic human values and ethics to derive the Food Value Framework (FVF). We conclude that the FVF could address shortcomings of current evaluation methods and serve as a common foundation to empower transdisciplinary research, value-based policy-making, transparent production, and responsible consumption across the food value chain.