Widespread shifts towards a sustainable food system are challenging as they might conflict with the desires of consumers, organizations, governments, and innovators (Loorbach et al., 2017). The success of a much-needed protein transition (Willett et al., 2019, Aiking & de Boer, 2020)—shifting from animal to alternative protein sources —demands protein alternatives (Jenkins et al., 2024, Szenderak et al., 2022) that can be produced at large scale (Tziva et al., 2020; Van der Weele et al., 2019), are low cost (Newton et al., 2024), and individually, culturally and socially acceptable to people. While much of the literature has largely focussed on micro-behavior change, it is critical to recognise the role of critical leverage points in the food system (Garnett 2016). But it is not sufficient to foster system-level changes. The success of a food system transition depends on how systematic changes interact with individual drivers, such as how they respond to the consumers’ desires, align with the consumers’ changing perception of food, and respond to consumer’s calls for action from government and agencies (Tziva et al., 2020). A transition in the food system requires a multidisciplinary understanding of what drives the consumer towards but also away from a sustainable diet. In this perspective, we propose a new framework – ReDIET– that embodies these interactions between individual and system level drivers. The ReDIET framework (Reframing Eating: Drivers, Influences, and Transitions) enables researchers and practitioners to identify push factors (those which push people away from unsustainable dietary choices) and pull factors (those which pull people towards more sustainable diets) in the individual-system interaction space. Using insights from various disciplines across the humanities, social sciences as well as natural sciences, we outline a range of push and pull factors to sustainable dietary choices that have been widely proposed and tested in specific disciplines that we cover in this perspective. Understanding these push and pull factors, inturn, facilitates the design of appropriate levers that enables systematic interventions to foster sustainable dietary change. Our interdisciplinary approach highlights the opportunities, controversies and (systematic) barriers of effective behavioural interventions that reach the consumer targeting what matters most to them: taste, price, health, tradition, and trends.