Sustainability and Novel Foods: Food Safety As a Necessary Pathway to Adapt Food Consumption to Sustainability

The chapter aims to discuss the role of sustainability principle and the risk management system in the food sector, as well as the relationship between scientific evolution, political responsibility and productive innovation. Sustainability must be discussed from a food safety perspective, specifically in relation to novel foods, as an alternative source to the consumption of traditional animal products and as an indirect tool to overcome intensive farming. The food sector has been the recipient of a profound intervention of politics and law, national and supranational, in which the law itself is called upon to govern the technical and productive evolution of the market, solicited by ethical, cultural, nutritional and economic discussions, which accompany the transition to sustainable agricultural and food systems. In this context, sustainability concerns both the administrative and management system of the complex procedures that regulate the sector, as well as the sustainability of production in terms of environment and resources utilization.