This paper presents the findings of a food systems model that considers how specific agronomic characteristics of organic agriculture could be harnessed so as to enable it to play a greater role in sustainable food systems.

This paper by FCRN member Dana Boyer examines how policy interventions at the city scale can affect three environmental outcomes of food production: greenhouse gas emissions, water use and land use. It uses India’s capital city Delhi as a case study. It sets out to assess the magnitude of city-scale food system actions as compared to certain actions which can be taken beyond the city boundary.

This new paper by FCRN member Elin Röös , the FCRN’s Tara Garnett and colleagues explores the following questions: What would be the implications, for land use and greenhouse gas emissions, if our global population moved away from eating beef and other ruminant meats and switched mostly to chicken? What if we all went vegan? What if all our meat demand were met by artificial meat? Or what  if, in an attempt to avoid ‘feed-food’ competition, we limited our consumption of animal products to what we could obtain by rearing animals on grasslands and feeding them byproducts and food waste?

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future (CLF) have developed an Excel spreadsheet that can assist in calculating the nutrient value of food that is wasted. 

This book contains six chapters on food security and sustainability in the Middle East. The book can be purchased in its entirety or by chapter online.

This paper describes an online choice experiment to understand consumer preferences around best-before dates, appearance, and packaging of food products; the paper specifically studies the demand for discounted ‘suboptimal’ products in the supermarket, and consumers’ willingness to use them in the home. 

FCRN member ffinlo Costain has alerted us to this report produced by Farmwel. Farmwel is an NGO working to generate momentum towards sustainable and accountable mainstream agriculture, focussing on the environment, people's livelihoods, and farm animal welfare. This blueprint report was produced with the additional support of the Conservative Environment Network, and the Conservative Animal Welfare Foundation.

This paper shows that a huge amount of nutrients is wasted each day in the US food supply, and that much of this waste includes important nutrients that are currently under-consumed in the US. It is one of the first studies to calculate the nutritional value of food wasted in the US at the retail and consumer levels, shining a light on just how much protein, fibre and other important nutrients end up in the landfill in a single year.

This paper compares stylised, hypothetical dietary scenarios to assess the potential for reducing agricultural land requirements. It suggests that a combination of smaller shifts in consumer diet behaviour – such as reducing beef consumption by replacing with chicken, introducing insects into mainstream diets and reducing consumer waste – could reduce agricultural land requirements.