Last week, at the pre-summit of the United Nations Food Systems Summit (UNFSS) in Rome, 500 in-person and 20,000 virtual delegates gathered to outline a pathway toward healthier, more sustainable and equitable food systems. It was an impressive lineup of speakers, ideas and initiatives that demonstrated the power the summit has in uniting global decision-makers around a shared food systems agenda.

To provide some insights for those who weren’t able to tune in, I was planning to write up a summary of the most important happenings. But after debriefing with some delegates, it turns out that there’s a more interesting story to tell.

Before diving into the details, let’s go over some basics. The UNFSS is the U.N.’s first high-level endeavor to raise awareness of the inter-linkages between the health, environmental, economic and social justice-related outcomes of food and agriculture sectors. The actual summit will take place in September in New York and bring together the world’s presidents and other decision-makers to act on food. In preparation, the pre-summit took place in Rome, tying together the work many groups have done over the past year. The cake has been baked in Rome and will be iced in New York, so to speak.

World leaders didn’t make healthy and sustainable diets a priority. Seven action coalitions were launched, but none includes work on reducing meat and dairy consumption in high-income countries and supporting communities around the world in shifting toward nourishing diets.

What does this really mean? Meals should be dominated by healthy and climate-friendly foods such as fruits, vegetables, legumes, whole grains, nuts and seeds that are prepared in culturally appropriate ways. Sustainably produced animal proteins can be valuable components of diets as well, but the factory-farm-powered overconsumption of meat we are seeing today in many countries should be scratched from our plates. Accelerating these two shifts would be essential to mitigating the global climate, biodiversity and public health crises. By focusing one of its five "Action Tracks" on sustainable consumption patterns, summit organizers have recognized the importance of this topic.

However, instead of agreeing on a "game-changing solution" for diets as part of an overall food systems transformation, as the summit organizers asked them to, world leaders let politics get in the way of progress. Let me explain why this means that despite the headway that has been made on other important topics such as school meals, food waste, and sustainable agriculture, UNFSS could fail to achieve what it set out to do.

Read the full article about sustainable food solutions by Theresa Lieb at GreenBiz.