Professor Tim Lang reflects on the crises facing food systems locally, nationally and globally, including obesity and overweight, the Ukraine war, diet-related inequalities, declines in biodiversity, and volatile food prices. In this blog for the Food Research Collaboration, he points to reasons to be hopeful: that pressure is building on governments to produce coherent food policy; that the UK has an active movement of food researchers and NGOs; and that the belief that markets alone can resolve the food system’s challenges is growing weaker.

This paper sets out 26 research priorities related to improving food environments, nutrition and health in Africa, based on the first Africa Food Environment Research Network Meeting. The research priorities focus broadly on understanding the key drivers of food consumption and acquisition, and on interventions and policies to improve food environments.

The UK-based Food Research Collaboration has put together a map of food research institutes in the UK that study food systems and food policy. It is aimed at academics seeking fellow subject specialists and at civil society and journalists seeking experts on food systems topics. 

This book discusses how food systems models can be used to understand both the impacts of agriculture and food across multiple dimensions of sustainability and the ability of the food system to provide nutrition despite global environmental change.

This book, which is being released in its third edition, offers a critical examination of the food system through the lenses of gender, ethnicity and poverty. This edition includes a new chapter on sustainable diets and ethical consumption.

This paper, co-authored by Jeroen Candel of TABLE, reflects on how to improve the interface between science and policy in the global food system. It discusses the recent finding of a European Commission report that there is a gap in the global food systems landscape for a platform that integrates and coordinates food systems knowledge, and questions how such a platform might operate effectively. 

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 report for the UK’s Food Standards Agency (FSA), co-authored by Table member Christian Reynolds, reviews how citizen science methods can be applied to food policy. Citizen science means actively involving citizens and communities in collecting data and creating new knowledge.

This blog series from the Future Food Beacon at the University of Nottingham explores the Palaeobenchmarking Resilient Agricultural Systems (PalaeoRAS) research project. The PalaeoRAS project seeks to understand how crops responded to climate stress in the past and might respond in the future.