The Building Back Better Agenda laid out by the Biden-Harris administration both depends on making progress on hunger and offers an opportunity to adopt new approaches that address the intersectional issues that contribute to existing high rates of food insecurity in the US. In order to achieve the Zero Hunger Goal of the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030, actionable, scalable, and innovative solutions are needed. Business as usual will return us to pre-pandemic rates of food insecurity that were unconscionably high to begin with. Current approaches to hunger place a premium on access to sufficient calories, with less attention to the quality of nutrients that are available, accessible, affordable and utilized by low-income households. These approaches emphasize food assistance but do not necessarily address the underlying causes of hunger. In addition, our food system exerts significant pressures on interconnected resource systems and to global greenhouse gas emissions. New approaches are needed, which could align strategies, outcomes and measures, especially across food, health, education, employment and social protection systems to have a lasting impact and to address intersectional issues and historic inequities. This includes the development of a suite of technical, social, and policy levers whose trade-offs need to be properly evaluated. Models and scenario-based tools can play a role in catalyzing a multi-stakeholder and policy dialogue about the trade-offs associated with different pathways toward zero-hunger. The metrics used for evaluating the various pathways being considered need to be developed in participation with cross-disciplinary experts and cross-sectoral stakeholders and decision makers.

The Zero Hunger Pathways Project (ZHPP) is a collaboration that applies a systems approach to end hunger in the United States. The collaborative aims to chart equitable, resilient, and sustainable pathways to profoundly improve availability, accessibility, utilization and stability of healthy food for all. This ZHPP dialogue will focus on identifying: 1) tools and models to evaluate pathways for improving food and nutrition security in the US; 2) multi-faceted evaluation metrics that reflect food systems sustainability, equitability, resilience, and health outcomes; 3) mechanisms and barriers for proper stakeholder engagement and trade-off dialogue; 4) mechanisms and barriers for science-policy communication. This event aims to bring together cross-disciplinary scientists and expert groups as well as cross-sectoral stakeholders and policy makers.