This book gives an overview of research methods used in the study of the relationship between food and digital and social media. Chapters cover textual analysis of websites and videos, digital ethnography, digital food networks, the influence of apps and social media on food habits, and digital archives and network analysis.

This book outlines historical revolutions in the global food system and calls for the global food system to become more diverse in many aspects, including crop species, production systems and farming cultures. 

This editorial in the Nature Food journal discusses the role that technology can and should play in reforming the food system. It argues that while technologies such as cultured meat, precision agriculture, drones and artificial intelligence are expected to contribute to sustainable food security in the future, technology often creates unexpected impacts that are hard to predict and that must be mitigated. Furthermore, it says, ethics and traditional knowledge systems are key to transforming the food system.

This report from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) examines three questions: how have food systems performed to date and what role did policies play? How can policy makers design coherent policies across the triple challenge of providing food security, livelihoods and environmental protection? How should policymakers treat the facts, interests, and values that often complicate the task of achieving better policies? It also presents case studies on the seed sector, ruminant livestock and processed foods.

This report by the Centre for Food Policy at City, University of London summarises the qualitative research methods that are available to help understand how people interact with food environments, including interviews, community observation and photo elicitation. The report notes that there has been relatively little qualitative (compared to quantitative) research on lived experiences of food environments, and that existing qualitative research often guides commercial product development but is less often used to inform policy.

This paper finds that suddenly banning wild meat from diets and markets, for example in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, could put some countries at risk of food insecurity, require an extra 124,000km2 of land to rear livestock as a replacement, and drive an additional 267 species towards extinction.

This book argues that transitioning from today’s industrial food system towards a more sustainable system requires cultural shifts. The author draws inspiration from themes in the Homeric epics to propose a new environmental governance model based on “eco‐states responsible for agroecological management”.

This blog post by Dr Rosalind Sharpe of the UK’s Food Research Collaboration asks what is meant by a “sustainable food system”. A group of students on the Centre for Food Policy’s Master’s course discussed this issue, and came up with a list of attributes including “healthy, equitable, inclusive, affordable, nutritious, culturally sensitive, sustainable, circular, resilient, respectful, lasting and simply ‘real’”.

This book, published February 2021, uses case studies from across the globe to discuss the future of food. Chapters cover food and place identities, politics of agricultural production, food trade, hunger and malnutrition, food insecurity in rich countries, and future scenarios for sustainable food and farming.