I recently had the chance to interview Isabel Madzorera, an Assistant Professor in Food, Nutrition, and Population Health at UC Berkeley and Associate Faculty Director at Berkeley Food Institute (BFI).   

Dr. Madzorera began researching nutrition and food systems in Africa by exploring malnutrition in the rural communities of her home country of Zimbabwe. Since then, she has conducted research on a number of issues that exist at the nexus of food systems, policy, maternal and child nutrition, climate change, and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Since joining BFI in 2024, Dr. Madzorera has applied her knowledge of African food systems to the context of the United States. Several of the most significant food-based concerns in urban African communities — highly processed foods, inequality, and the presence of food deserts — are analogous to problems faced in American communities.

I wanted to learn more about her research, its connections to global food system issues and her collaborations with the Berkeley Food Institute. 

What drew you to studying nutrition and food systems in Africa?

I grew up in Zimbabwe, where a lot of nutritional problems are evident. Once I got exposed to nutrition, and particularly once I spent time with communities in rural areas, I understood just how bad it was. It was clear to me that a huge part of the population in Zimbabwe could not afford a healthy diet. It was actually quite jarring to see so many children that were physically undernourished. 

I was interested in trying to really understand what was going on and what could be done to deal with that problem. I started locally, and my interest in nutrition has grown over time, with the understanding that there are so many different factors that influence nutrition, especially social inequity. In Zimbabwe and in many of the countries I have worked, it’s quite evident that that’s one of the key drivers for nutritional challenges.

In your research, you describe the food environment as “the physical, economic, political and social, cultural context in which consumers engage with the food system.” How would you characterize the food environment in the African countries you’ve worked in?

African food systems, just like any other food system, are quite complex. Traditionally, we thought about African food environments as ones that are just characterized by a limited availability of the healthy foods or food groups like fruits and vegetables. When you look across African cities and urban areas, sometimes within the same country, there’s such a wide variety of food systems. 

Within the African rural areas, I worry more about productivity and diversified production, so production of fruits and vegetables that could be part of a healthy diet. I also worry about the lack of food value chains that protect or preserve perishable products. Foods, vegetables, and animal products in rural areas tend to be lost. A lot of food loss and food waste is a result of really limited access to technology and processing capacity to preserve the nutrients that households or communities have access to. 

When you think about African urban food systems, they might resemble food markets in any country in the world. I worry about access to refined and ultra-processed foods that are really just empty calories with limited availability of micronutrients. There’s a problem of unregulated marketing and development of food products without much oversight, which is leading to what we call the double burden of malnutrition, where you’ve got undernutrition and the typical problems of stunting in children, but rising obesity and non-communicable diseases at the same time. 

How has your work informed food systems policy?

I was one of a wonderful group of people that were tasked with drafting the latest High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition report on the resilience of food systems, where we discussed how we can make sure that food systems in all parts of the world are able to withstand shocks and address some of the underlying inequities that drive inefficiencies in current food systems. 

My experience from the African continent has actually been very applicable to other food environments in terms of thinking about some of the underlying issues behind inefficiencies in food systems. For example, we can think about food deserts here in the United States being quite similar to the ones in low and middle income countries, with people facing limited physical access or long distances to regional food markets to access foods. That report, which was just released in September, pushes countries in the United Nations to think about food system transformation in a different way. 

The report highlights that there needs to be an overhaul of food systems as we think about them currently. We’re really thinking about the importance of diversifying production across different foods and also diversifying food players within food supply chains.

The recommendations are now broad, but the idea is that the recommendations will then drive additional thinking at the country level for policy makers to think about how they can, within their own context, transform food systems.

How does your work at BFI inform your research and vice versa?

My work with BFI is really shedding light on one critical area where there hasn’t been sufficient progress within the United States — the availability of overprocessed foods and their lack of regulation and how that’s impacting nutrition and health outcomes. Entire communities are living at the mercy of food industries. 

Part of the work has been doing webinars. We did one webinar on ultra-processed foods and there’s another one upcoming at the end of this month on California specific legislation on processed foods and how that might shape the next few years of nutrition programming. The webinars are really an opportunity to self-reflect and see how policies around consumption of ultra-processed foods have progressed. 

It manifests differently depending on the environment, but the solutions are probably similar, and we can do a lot of cross-learning by bringing global work to work in the United States. We can also take some of the learnings from the United States into the global arena.  

I’m excited to build a long-standing relationship with BFI, and to be part of the innovative work that BFI is doing in multiple areas within the food systems, policy, education.