Food and Tourism Nexus, challenges and opportunities
Urgent actions
- Legislation should be inspected for contradictions, e.g., avoiding companies dealing with UPF to access public subsidies/tax exemptions. Benefits and costs should be distributed in ways that do not perpetuate inequalities. - Investing in information and promotion campaigns. to drift at least some of the attention from the unethical multi-channel marketing by large corporations towards SME with good practices. - Communication by institutions has a lot of room for improvement. It may start by reorganising sites to ensure that tourists and the general population easily reach meaningful informat... Leer másion (e.g., about local gastronomy, because most of our food heritage is balanced and sustainable but it is not valued). - Investing in knowledge transfer from academia to food producers, ensuring innovation is meaningful and has a purpose. Notably, family businesses & SME are the guardians of local biodiversity, ancient recipes, know-how and histories, which are valuable natural and cultural assets that risk disappearing. - Portuguese gastronomy connected to the MD, ought to be better promoted. However, diets evolve, including the MD. Therefore, we have to be selective on what habits and foods to import. Awareness should be raised among whoever prepares food, about the need to avoid using UPFs, while understanding the reasons behind their usage. Is it due to a lack of qualified workers, low net profits, or both? - Improve territorial policies that encourage local food production and short value chains. Food systems have to be able to ensure the necessary food security of local people in the face of demand-side changes (e.g. too high prices and/or reduced availability of traditional foods, due to excessive tourism). - Price-driven changes in food habits are to avoid. In Portugal an important and growing part of the ingested calories are from UPF. Bottom-up (improved food literacy) and top-down (adequate regulatory framework) measures are needed. Leer menos



