Sustainability and novel foods: food safety as a necessary pathway to adapt food consumption to sustainability requirements

The chapter aims to discuss the role of sustainability principle and the risk management system in the food sector, as well as the relationship be-tween scientific evolution, political responsibility and productive innova-tion. Sustainability must be discussed from a food safety perspective, spe-cifically in relation to novel foods, as an alternative source to the con-sumption of traditional animal products and as 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 dis-cussions, which accompany the transition to sustainable agricultural and food systems. In this context, sustainability concerns both the administra-tive and management system of the complex procedures that regulate the sector, as well as the sustainability of production in terms of environment and resources utilisation.