Frequently Asked Questions

What is the vision for the Nutrients for All initiative? 

The Nutrients for All initiative envisions a Nutrients for All world—a world where natural ecosystems, farms, foods, and people have access to the nutrients they need to thrive. But it goes beyond that—we need to change the incentives in the system so that it moves towards a Nutrient Economy.

A Nutrient Economy highlights the economy opportunity to conduct exchanges between natural ecosystems, farms, foods and people based upon nutrient values. This framework also enables the unleashing of new innovations, collaborations and initiatives that bring vitality to people and the planet.

We have the blueprint for this Nutrient Economy framework, but we need your help in defining the steps and initiatives that can make it happen. Join us to help define what this economy will look like.

What does a Nutrients for All world look like?

 In a Nutrients for All world the walls between the fields of natural environment, agriculture, food and human wellness would come down. The connections between these fields, via nutrient flows, would be explicit, and perhaps even monetized to establish the incentives needed for change. For example, when foods are valued based on their nutrient content, it will be an incentive for farmers and food companies to produce those foods.

We would understand the important role nutrients play in sustaining healthy natural ecosystems, productive and healthy farming, nourishing foods, and human wellness. People would demand that nutrients are enhanced and preserved along every step of this nutrient value chain.

Why vitality?

Vitality means more than healthy—it means living to the fullest, in people and in the natural environment.

For people it is the ability to participate fully in school, work, home and community, which is ultimately possible only when our landscapes and food crops are also living to their fullest. While traditional healthcare focuses on people who are sick, and wellness focuses on a broader range of factors that prevent illness to begin with, a focus on vitality seeks to ensure that people can use their skills, muscles, brainpower and creativity to the maximum.

In the same way, while traditional environmental protection usually emphasizes the prevention of pollution or other environmental degradation, vitality emphasizes the more powerful force of a healthy natural environment to grow and regenerate, to produce the nutrients and other services that are necessary for life on Earth like clean air and water, that fuel economic activity including agriculture, and that provide resilience against natural and economic disasters.

How did this idea come about?

The Nutrient Economy concept emerged from observing the work of our Fellows in rural farming. Many Fellows were focusing on addressing malnutrition, and many of those people who were malnourished were in fact farmers. They were surrounded by food, but did not have all of the nutrients they needed to live lives of vitality.

From that we began to think about the connections between people and food, food and farming and farming and the natural ecosystem. We began to see that the key connector between these areas was nutrients—nutrient abundance in a healthy ecosystem helps create nutrient rich soils for farming; farming methods that enhance and retain the nutrient content of raw foods (grains, fruits and vegetables) in turn have a greater potential to maintain wellness in people.

We came to understand not only the central role of nutrients in the food value chain and in human health and vitality, but also to identify opportunities to build activities and change incentives around these nutrients: that nutrients could be the currency by which transactions between different parts of the value chain eere made. For example, what if we valued vegetables by their nutrient content instead of their weight? Hence the idea of a Nutrient Economy was born.