Balancing a sustained pursuit of nutrition, health, affordability and climate goals: exploring the case of Indonesia.

Background: To guide the transformation of food systems to provide for healthy and sustainable diets, countries need to assess their current diet and food supply in comparison to nutrition, health, affordability, and environmental goals.

Objectives: We sought to compare Indonesia's food utilization to diets optimized for nutritional value and cost and to diets that are increasingly plant-based in order to meet further health and environmental goals, including the EAT-Lancet planetary health diet, to explore whether multiple goals could be achieved simultaneously.

Methods: We compared 13 dietary scenarios (2 current, 7 optimized, 3 increasingly plant-based, 1 EAT-Lancet) for nutrient content, cost, greenhouse gas emissions (GHGe), and water footprints, using the FAO food balance sheet, Indonesia Household Income and Expenditure Survey household food expenditure, food composition, life cycle assessment, food losses, and trade data.

Cost of the Diet: a method and software to calculate the lowest cost of meeting recommended intakes of energy and nutrients from local foods.

Background: When food is available, the main obstacle to access is usually economic: people may not be able to afford a nutritious diet, even if they know what foods to eat. The Cost of the Diet method and software was developed to apply linear programming to better understand the extent to which poverty may affect people's ability to meet their nutritional specifications. This paper describes the principles of the method; the mathematics underlying the linear programming; the parameters and assumptions on which the calculations are based; and then illustrates the output of the software using examples taken from assessments.

Assessing the potential of wild foods to reduce the cost of a nutritionally adequate diet: an example from eastern Baringo District, Kenya.

Background: Wild foods and their actual and potential contributions to nutrition security have rarely been studied or considered in nutrition and conservation programs.

Objective: To study the role of wild food biodiversity in achieving a cost reduction of a nutritionally adequate diet for women and young children in Kenya using linear programming.

Methods: An ethnobiological inventory of available food biodiversity was carried out by means of focus group discussions, and five wild foods were selected for further modeling.