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This thesis examines the trajectory of food politics and its relationship with modernizing food landscapes. Today’s food politics discussions in the US and other high-income countries lean towards concerns with social issues, while in the recent past it was more focused on producing enough food to feed the growing population – two different situations with important concerns. The question this thesis explores is whether the modernization of society has given us a higher level of wellbeing and a better world through food landscapes and food policy, and how we came up with the current food situations we face today. It looks into the food landscape and policies of the US and its implications on wellbeing, and the dietary transition of Japan, comparing it to other modernized countries. It is important to look at these factors of food politics to see how other countries may handle a food transition, and whether or not there is a direction all countries can go in that will better benefit its food landscapes. Concerns not only lie in producing sufficient yields but also in wellbeing, cultural values, and true consumer demands. Only when true consumer demands are acknowledged individually can the trajectory of food politics be better harnessed and guided to a more desirable outcome than it has been going in so far.

The nature of food insecurity has been changing in the world. While research on food insecurity in developing countries used to focus on undernourishment (i.e. lack of calorie consumption) and related outcomes, today, many developing countries face at least a “double burden of malnutrition” with persistently high rates of undernourishment and increasing rates of overweight, obesity and related non-communicable diseases (NCDs). An important driver of overweight and obesity in developing countries is the „nutrition transition“, i.e. the trend towards the consumption of more energy-dense, highly processed foods and more sedentary lifestyles. Two essays of this Ph.D. thesis analyse drivers and consequences of the nutrition transition in developing countries with a particular focus on the role of supermarkets, which have been rapidly spreading in many countries. We provide evidence that the presence of supermarkets causally affects dietary choices and nutritional outcomes. Data collection for this research was carried out in small Kenyan towns of the kind that accommodate most of the country’s urban population. We designed our sample to be quasi-experimental in nature and employ instrumental variable techniques to allow for endogeneity of supermarket purchases. Kenya’s supermarket landscape is dynamic and so far, it has followed the ‘traditional pattern’ of the so-called supermarket revolution. Supermarket purchases are found to contribute to the nutrition transition by shifting consumption towards processed and away from unprocessed foods. At the same time, calorie availability increases as calories are sourced at lower prices in supermarkets. We find that supermarket purchases increase adult Body Mass Index and their probability of being overweight or obese. Yet, we also find that buying in a supermarket tends to decrease underweight among children and adolescents (age 5-19) in terms of stunting (height-for-age). In a third essay, we use secondary household survey data from Malawi to analyse ‘one of the other faces of malnutrition’. The world food price crisis of 2007/08 and other global and regional price and income shocks that followed have spurred interest in producing timely predictions on their implications for food security. A critical research gap remains with comparing simulation outcomes across studies that use different, established methods on the same subject. This is to establish if and to which extent they might result in different and potentially conflicting policy recommendations. We address this gap building on three simulation studies set in Malawi, which analyse welfare in terms of food security and income effects using the same 2004/05 household survey data but resort to methodologies of different complexity. We harmonize simulation scenarios across methods and systematically modify relevant parameters for our comparative assessment. We find differences between methods to depend on the scenario under consideration and to grow with increasing rates of simulated price changes. The differences we find are driven by differences in conceptualising price changes. In case of Malawi, for a reasonable set of observed price changes, mean outcomes on district levels are fairly robust to underlying methodologies. We illustrate that is it important to improve our understanding of how changes in the underlying methodologies change results and to analyse the sensitivity of simulation outcomes to different model assumptions.

Le microbiome intestinal humain est une importante communauté de microorganismes, spécifique aux individus et aux populations, dont la composition est influencée par de nombreux facteurs, tels que la génétique et les habitudes de vie de son hôte. La diète est cependant un élément majeur façonnant sa structure. Les influences de plusieurs diètes humaines sur le microbiome ont été largement investiguées. Toutefois, l’impact des variations saisonnières inhérentes à certaines diètes est peu connu. La diète traditionnelle inuite est un exemple de régime alimentaire riche en graisses et protéines animales qui varie temporellement en fonction de la disponibilité saisonnière des ressources. Afin d’étudier les dynamiques temporelles du microbiome intestinal inuit en réponse à la diète traditionnelle, des échantillons de papier hygiénique contenant des selles ont été récoltés auprès d’un groupe de volontaire Inuits du Nunavut (Canada) durant huit mois. Un groupe contrôle de Montréalais (Québec, Canada) de descendance européenne, consommant une diète typiquement occidentale, a également été sollicité. La diversité et la composition du microbiome ont été caractérisées par le séquençage de la région V4 de l’ARNr 16s. Les microbiomes obtenus par un échantillonnage de papier hygiénique et de selles ont été comparés. Ces deux méthodes offrent des représentations similaires mais non-identiques du microbiome intestinal. À partir du séquençage d’échantillons de papier hygiénique, nous avons trouvé que les variations inter-individuelles du microbiome sont plus importantes que les variations intra-individuelles au sein de Montréal et du Nunavut. Des différences significatives de la composition du microbiome s’expliqueraient par la consommation différentielle de certains groupes alimentaires. Bien qu’aucune différence saisonnière marquée n’ait été observée, en termes de composition, le microbiome fluctue davantage à travers le temps chez les individus inuits. Ces résultats suggèrent que le microbiome inuit pourrait être façonné par une diète plus variable. Ensemble, nos résultats suggèrent que la diète traditionnelle a encore un impact important sur la composition, la diversité et la stabilité de microbiome inuit, malgré les transitions alimentaires vécues au Nunavut. / The human gut microbiome represents a diverse microbial community specific to individuals and populations, which is heavily influenced by factors such as genetics and lifestyle. Diet is a major force shaping the gut microbiome, and the effects of dietary choices on microbiome composition have been thoroughly investigated. It has been shown that a change in diet also changes the gut microbiome, but the effects of seasonal diets are poorly known. The traditional Inuit diet is primarily based on animal products, which vary seasonally based on prey availability. To investigate the dynamics of the Inuit diet over time, we collected gut microbiome samples from Inuit volunteers living in Resolute Bay (Nunavut, Canada), and compared them to samples collected from individuals of European descent living in Montréal (Québec, Canada) and consuming a typical Western diet. We sequenced the V4 region of the 16S rRNA gene to characterize the diversity and composition of the Inuit microbiome, and surveyed differences among samples collected with toilet paper or from stool. Our results show that these sampling methods provide similar, but non-identical portraits of the microbiome. Based on sequencing from toilet paper samples alone, we found that inter-individual variations of the microbiome community composition were greater than within-individual variations, both in Nunavut and Montreal, with significant differences in microbiome explained by dietary preferences. No defined seasonal shift of microbiome composition was detected in samples collected over time. However, within-individual microbial diversity fluctuated more with time in Nunavut than in Montreal. Together, these results underline that the traditional Inuit diet still has an important impact on the composition, diversity and stability of the Inuit gut microbiome, even if the traditional seasonality of the diet is less pronounced than expected, due to an increasingly westernized diet in Nunavut.