“The People's Summit”: A case for lived experience of food environments as a critical source of evidence to inform the follow-up to the 2021 UN Food Systems Summit

Under the direction of the United Nations (UN) Secretary General, a UN Food Systems Summit (UNFSS) took place in September 2021 prior to the 2021 UN General Assembly meeting. The Summit aimed to “launch bold new actions, solutions and strategies to deliver progress on all 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (United Nations, 2021)”, the success of each being directly linked to healthier, more sustainable, and more equitable food systems. To achieve this, the Summit was positioned as ‘The People's Summit’, one that aimed to bring people together in a participatory manner to collectively work “to transform the way the world produces, consumes and thinks about food”1, ideally resulting in a “dramatically elevated public discourse about the importance of food systems” (United Nations, 2021). In this paper, we set out why generating and communicating evidence of people's lived experience is vital to ensure that the promise of ‘The People's Summit’ is upheld. We identify three key reasons why, and provide recommendations on how this can be done. We recognize that the lived experiences of all stakeholders in the food system are important and relevant. However, for the purposes of this article we focus on lived experience research (LER) relating to food environments, which are considered to be a key interface where people interact with the wider food system to acquire and consume foods