This book tells the story of changing patterns of food provision in the UK during the COVID-19 pandemic. From the pandemic to the war in Ukraine, climate change and inflation, the authors discuss the food system’s winners and losers in a time of rapid social change.

Supermarkets provide the majority of food to consumers in the Western world and are therefore an excellent site for research into food environment interventions. However, such interventions can be hard to research and implement due to the misalignment of public health and commercial priorities, as well as difficulties with brokering relationships between supermarkets and researchers. This paper distils the experience of several studies to provide specific recommendations for conducting high quality research with commercial retail chains.

This report from the UK government’s Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs presents detailed statistics on food security in the UK, covering global food availability, UK food sources, food supply chain resilience, household food security, and food safety & consumer confidence. 

Table member Tom Quested has co-authored this report for the United Nations Environment Programme. The report presents up-to-date and comprehensive estimates of food waste around the world, based on the collation of a large number of national estimates of food waste. It also presents a methodology for countries to measure food waste consistently. The report focuses on waste from households, food service and retail.

Table members Ximena Schmidt Rivera, Sarah Bridle and Christian Reynolds have co-authored this paper, which finds that the cooking method used to prepare foods at home in the UK can account for up to 61% of total emission for some food types, and that emissions from cooking can be easily reduced. The paper is based on a survey of how UK consumers actually cook various foodstuffs, as opposed to recipe recommendations.

This book uses nine case studies to argue that promoting home-cooked meals as a solution to social and environmental food system problems risks placing a disproportionate burden on individual families, in particular mothers.

This paper by Verma et al., with FCRN member Thom Achterbosch as co-author, estimates that consumers across the world are probably wasting over twice as much food as previously believed. The study is based on the FAOSTAT Food Balance Sheets, but goes further than the Food and Agriculture Organisation in that it factors in how consumer affluence affects food waste. It finds that once people spend more than $6.70 per day (in total, not just on food), food waste starts to rise - suggesting that consumer food waste is an issue even in lower-middle income countries, not only in wealthier countries.

This book uses a range of case studies to explore how food and immigration influence each other in North America, focusing on borders (e.g. geopolitical or cultural), labour and identities (including changing diets).

This report by FCRN member Corné van Dooren finds that food waste per person in Dutch households has decreased by 29% between 2010 and 2019. The findings are based on measurements of waste from a sample of households.