For Food EDU’s Food Quality and Planetary Health course, we travelled to Fiji to tell a story about what happens when food, health, climate and culture collide. Fiji has an extraordinary diversity of traditional foods, yet changing diets, increasing reliance on imported and processed products and climate pressures are contributing to some of the highest rates of non-communicable disease in the world.

The video explores these challenges through the people working with food every day. Across Nadi and Suva, we brought together food producers, practitioners and researchers to show how traditional staples such as breadfruit and root crops connect nutrition with culture, livelihoods and resilience. The story moves between farms, food preparation and research, grounding the wider food systems issues in the choices people make and the foods available to them.

We led production from end to end, beginning with story development and narrative planning before filming on location in Fiji. Rather than relying on a single expert voice, we built the documentary around different perspectives, weaving practical experience with research and allowing the bigger food systems story to emerge through the people closest to it.

Back in the studio, we shaped the interviews and observational footage into a concise educational documentary, completing the edit and post-production for use within Food EDU’s open-access learning platform. The film forms part of Module 2, Embedding Sustainable Food Systems into Nutrition Practice, which helps nutrition and health professionals understand how food systems influence human and planetary health and apply systems thinking in their own practice.

The documentary sits within a wider course that encourages nutrition professionals to move beyond nutrients alone and consider food quality through nutritional, ecological, social and cultural dimensions.