Dr. Liesel Carlsson, Interim Director and Professor at Acadia and – Registered Dietitian

Her PhD was completed in Sweden at Blekinge Institute of Technology (Strategic Sustainable Development). See more about her education and courses at Acadia, Research and her most recent publication

At present, a lot of my work is on the https://internationaldietetics.org/sustainability/

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"it keeps coming back to me the famous words of Barb Anderson take care of those relationships those are as important to get work done to move towards something that you are driven to move towards ... it is unlikely you are going to do it well without the support of the people around you... you know so sometimes you may have to give up the outcome in order to take care of the relationship ... and to get really theoretical on you... I actually really like that... you have this constellation of food system actors that are all interacting with one another.... and these subclusters and humans are exactly like that too, social systems are exactly just like that and when you start to degrade the relationships between people... if you don't attend to those relationships... the system actually starts to fall apart just like in the food system... I'm going to carry Barb's torch and say... pay attention to your relationships."

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Podcast Moments

“my biggest hope is that… people will get excited about… what we can contribute... I can feel this gap between today and tomorrow and I want to be a part of the transition… oh that’s really cute… she really cares!”

“how sustainability affects food access is big… we can do a whole interview on that…but it’s interesting… one of my colleagues handed me a paper that essentially looked at the two of them - that essentially lined up the food and agricultural organizations definitions of food security which is about access and availability and utilization and stability ... and they … just broke it out into those three classic dimensions of environment, and social, economic and looked at them and lined them up… if I am going to narrow it down… it’s a story of low income families often times of how economics meets food… and it’s almost a predictable crowd and almost a predictable scenario… but it turns out that food security on [school] campus is extremely high... but I was shocked at how high it was... for me the university story was so surprising."

“I have a couple of colleagues who every once and a while hold up the reality to me… when you are so entrenched in the world of sustainability… but I care and I think it’s important and I try to activate change… and in my believing self everyone else wants to do the same.”

“… people eat mostly because it tastes good… but I actually think taste should be the number one… what tastes good is often also really healthy and often tends to fall in line with what is sustainable anyways… and tend to be from whole foods…”

“I think it is ok to not know anything about food and actually not really care about food and that’s healthy, but it is also important and healthy to be really literate about food and what it is and where it comes from and to make joyous choices about your food and also based on knowing that your food choices is a political action as well.”

“work of ecologists... and for me right now... how I find it helpful to think about food systems... is to think of them as adaptive and complex systems... and it can change over time... constellation of different actors and networks... there's clusters... looking at food systems as... looking up at the stars and drawing lines in between them."

"I tend to stay away from being too prescriptive..."

"when I am thinking from a global perspective again my message in a sustainable future - a hard line that all humans need to be vegan is not sustainable i think we all understand it doesn't work like that ... yea but I think right now for the people where it is a acceptable, I think the more plants ... the more we can pull back on that mass consumption of animal proteins the more likely we are able to get through the funnel, the crunch... are we actually going to be able to slow down the rising tide of our climate right now, for most Canadians right now I would say that's doable."

"[Food Art] and he takes the ice cube tray full of these ingredients and tossed it and "voom" all over the floor... and wouldn't it be so fun to watch it smash... and there are certain ages food art aren't ready for it."

"I am a big believer in the power of communities… let people decide what their food future will look like.”

“they need to be diverse and that’s what makes the world beautiful.”

Resources Mentioned:

https://old.naturalstep.ca/ - a good introduction