To address our most pressing human and planetary health challenges, we need to rely on food biodiversity. We need to explore food biodiversity more deeply and widely, become more curious and systematic about documenting local food biodiversity and all associated traditional knowledge related to these precious resources that are the secret to helping us transition to more climate-smart, people and planet friendly food systems.
- We currently understand about 1 percent of the thousands of compounds present in the foods we eat every day.
- In addition, current food composition tables, have only documented the nutritional composition of a small range of available edible food biodiversity.
- Using new scientific methods, we can now detect thousands of biologically active compounds present in our food. Not only, is there much to discover about our favourite foods that we consume daily, but also about food that we have relied on for centuries, but is out of the mainstream, including thousands of cultivars, varieties and breeds of traditional and location specific edible treasures.
- The Periodic Table of Food Initiative (PTFI) is a global effort to catalogue the biomolecular composition of the world's food biodiversity using new data-driven innovations and creating a global network of partners with a-like vision to document edible biodiversity.
- The PTFI is designed to democratize access to new scientific tools and techniques and mobilize resources that benefit researchers in locations around the globe.
- The global ecosystem of the PTFI extends to partners on every continent, from Fiji to Thailand to Ghana and Colombia. It is building a global infrastructure of like-minded partners who want to build a better future through food. Food biodiversity is all around us, we just need to harness our collective curiosity to increasingly document the planetary and health benefits of more diverse food systems.
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