This study examines how storytelling can change consumer perceptions toward unattractive food, such as fruit and vegetables. It finds that a combination of storytelling and marketing practices such as coupons significantly increases the consumption of unattractive food, and recommends that retailers employ such methods to reduce food waste. 

This book by Anna Murcott provides a social history of food packaging which takes a wide historical and geographic lens to examine shifts from domestic to commercial production, the emergence of associated technologies, changes in retailing, implications for policy and practice, and current concerns about over packaging.

This article explores the role of trade as a potential driver of inequitable aquatic food distribution through its analysis of global aquatic food consumption patterns, trade characteristics, and impacts from 1976 to 2019. The authors find an increase in per capita consumption of aquatic foods over this time period at the global scale, a reduction in the average consumption rate of foods higher in the aquatic food chain, and improved distribution of high value aquatic foods through structural trade patterns. The authors hope to contribute to future research on the globalisation of aquatic food systems, aquaculture and the impacts of trade on food security.

Food loss and waste is thought to contribute to 24% of greenhouse gas emissions from the global food system, which amounts to 6% of total emissions. It is generally assumed that if food loss and waste were to decrease, less food would need to be produced, which would ultimately reduce associated environmental impacts. However, this study looks at an alternative scenario where reduced food loss and waste causes a ‘rebound effect’ in which the resultant price decreases cause an increase in consumption.

This paper investigates the resilience of the UK fish farms to risk through their level of adherence to circular economic principles. The authors define circular economics as a shift from a wasteful linear system, to a regenerative closed-loop system, through reduced resource use, the elimination of waste and pollution, and a focus on repair, reuse and recycling rather than disposal. They argue that through aligning with circular economic principles, seafood companies may be able to increase their resilience to future economic and environmental risks whilst simultaneously improving their environmental impacts.

The number of people in the world that could theoretically be fed depends on how much food can be produced, as well as factors such as dietary composition (particularly the balance between crop and animal products) and what agricultural land is used for which purpose (cropping versus grazing). The potential for agricultural production is itself critically dependent on nitrogen availability. Nitrogen can be delivered in the form of mineral or organic fertiliser.  While nitrogen is an essential input into agricultural production, nitrogen pollution is a major problem, with the degree of pollution caused a function of the quantity of nitrogen produced as well as the efficiency of its uptake and use by crops ( these will be influenced by climatic and other biophysical factors) - the Nitrogen Use Efficiency (NUE).

This report from the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) serves as an update to the 2018 Wasted Food Report and provides detailed estimates, by sector and management pathway, of 2019 wasted food estimates.

This book explores policies on food waste and loss from around the world, including France, Italy, Romania, Japan, China and the United States. It is aimed at students, academics and policymakers.

In this report, WWF explores what would happen if the UK were to feed livestock only on “low opportunity cost” feed sources such as grass, food waste and industrial byproducts. It argues that pressures on arable land could be reduced while producing more food overall than in a completely vegan food system; that a reduced livestock population would free up land for nature restoration; that the UK’s impacts on ecosystems in other countries would be reduced; and that space would be made for more extensive forms of grazing and mixed farming, such as agroecological farming using crop rotations. For comparison, see the Sustainable Food Trust report Feeding Britain from the ground up for a similar vision for the UK’s food system (albeit with a non-zero level of grain-fed livestock production).