Sustainable nutrition: Speaking with Dr. <PERSON>, winner of the 2021 World Food Prize · Global Voices
Dr. <PERSON> making the keynote presentation at Accelerating the End of Hunger and Malnutrition – A Global Event, on November 29, 2018, in Bangkok, Thailand. Photo by <PERSON> for FAO/IFPRI on Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
On May 11, Trinidad and Tobago-born Dr. <PERSON>, a nutritional scientist who is also a Danish citizen, was announced as the winner of the 2021 World Food Prize, in recognition of her 40 years of ground-breaking work improving the health of millions of people in the Global South.
The foundation that bestows the prestigious honour each year was founded in 1986 by 1970 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and “Father of the Green Revolution” Dr. <PERSON>. The prize, worth 250,000 United States dollars, recognises individuals who find ways of improving people's quality of life by sustainably enhancing the global food supply.
Dr. <PERSON> was chosen for her “groundbreaking research, her critical insights and landmark innovations” in understanding and promoting the importance of aquatic food. By devising “holistic, nutrition-sensitive approaches to aquaculture” with her network of international collaborators, Dr. <PERSON> succeeded in boosting the nutrition of millions of vulnerable people around the world while securing their livelihoods by building more resilient ecosystems into the bargain.
In the 1980s—the same decade that the World Food Prize Foundation was formed—while working at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease and Research in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Dr. <PERSON> was deeply affected by the large number of children suffering from malnutrition; she decided to try improving the nutritional value of their diets by creating a food system using small, native fish as a staple. Her idea soon became a movement: people began raising fish locally and inexpensively, transforming the diets and livelihoods of impoverished communities in Asia and Africa, where food insecurity was a concern.
In this two-part interview post (you can read the second instalment here), Dr. 803
<PERSON> spoke to me via email about her passion for nutrition and the many people she's been able to help.
<PERSON> (JMF): What has been the most satisfying part of your journey and what impact will the prize have on your work?
Dr. <PERSON> (SHT): Being able to work with communities, mothers and children and knowing that my work can have a positive impact on their lives. Working with younger researchers and students and being able to [impart] knowledge to them, which they can carry further in their work and benefit communities. I hope that getting this award will give me a platform to change the way we look at [and] work with food systems—moving the narrative from ‘just feeding’ to ‘nourishing.’ Also, getting this award I hope will inspire young people, [especially] young women, to study science and take up a career in food and nutrition.
<PERSON>: What drove you to rethink how people could be fed nutritiously en masse?
SHT: Working with severely malnourished children and their mothers [in Bangladesh], I witnessed first-hand the power of diverse, nutritious foods in keeping people well-nourished and healthy. This can be done sustainably, through employing very many pathways […] producing diverse foods; paying attention to quantity as well as quality, nutritional quality and food safety; consuming sufficient [food], not excess; greatly reducing food waste and loss.
Dr. <PERSON>, winner of the 2021 World Food Prize for her trailblazing scientific work in making aquatic food systems an integral part of sustainable food production, thereby relieving hunger, aiding livelihoods and increasing all-round resilience. Photo courtesy Dr. <PERSON>, used with permission.
JMF: How did your Caribbean roots factor into how you thought about this problem of food security? What made you look to the sea when most people think of agriculture as land-based?
SHT: Growing up in Trinidad and in a home in which my grandmother ruled the kitchen, I did not think of the issue of some people facing food insecurity. My grandmother instilled in us the value of healthy food for good brain—[including] fish—and for being strong. Working in Bangladesh, the most nutritious food in the diet, small fish, comes from water. The sea is not the only source of aquatic foods. Inland waters—lakes, rivers, seasonal water bodies, floodplains—are extremely important sources of diverse aquatic foods [like] animals, plants, seaweed. Two-thirds of the planet is covered by water, so we must make use of this potential for harvesting and growing diverse, nutritious foods, sustainably. 820