Sustainable Food Systems MSc at University of Leeds

Providing nutritious, safe and affordable food for all in a sustainable manner is one of the greatest challenges of our times. Food practitioners need to able to respond to food safety and security concerns, shifting attitudes towards food and farming, changing diets and demographics, as well as balance global economic and environmental pressures.

This course comes at a time when food and its implications on our health and planet is making headlines. Current challenges include malnutrition and obesity, the food waste-hunger paradox, and food’s devastating environmental impact. Global food consumption and production accounts for a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions, making our food choice the most effective way to address climate change.

Food is the single strongest lever to optimise human health and environmental sustainability; however, transforming our food system is not an easy task. Our food system is highly complex; it works across different scales, from the local to the global, it involves a wide range of interconnected actors, it has environmental, social, economic and political drivers and implications.

Our MSc in Sustainable Food Systems, therefore, uses a holistic systems thinking approach to understand, evaluate, and deconstruct the complexity of the food system, in order to formulate sustainable solutions addressing the grand challenges we are facing, such as food security and global environmental change.

Career opportunities

This course will equip you with both the necessary knowledge and skills (such as systems thinking, problem solving, strategy and policy making) to become an effective change agent that will lead the transition to more sustainable food systems. Through its interdisciplinary nature, it offers a holistic or systems-based perspective of the food system and balances critical thinking with practical solutions which is key to enhancing employability prospects.

This programme is ideal for those intending to pursue a range of future employment roles in management and decision making positions, in a wide range of organisations such as but not limited to agribusiness, food processing, retail, non-governmental organisations, charities, social enterprises, governmental organisations and policy making bodies e.g. Defra, WRAP, regulatory bodies, food standards organisations, consultancy, international organisations e.g. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).