The Food Law and Policy Clinic at Harvard Law School, partnering with the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future, has released an update to the toolkit Good Laws, Good Food: Putting Local Food Policy to Work for Our Communities. The toolkit is intended as a guide for advocates who seek to influence food law and policy in their local communities in the US.

This new book, edited by Michel. P. Pimbert, Director at the Center for Agroecology, Water and Resilience in the U.K., critically examines the kinds of knowledge and ways of knowing needed for food sovereignty, agroecology and biocultural diversity.

This report from IIED looks at when and how social learning-oriented approaches contribute to better and more sustainable development outcomes, focusing specifically on food security and climate change.

The Cambridge News reports on a recent start-up called Entomics, who are researching and developing the use of Black Soldier Fly larvae as a means of converting food waste into compounds that can be extracted and turned into more useful products.

The local food movement is one of the most active of current civil engagement social movements. This work presents primary evidence from over 900 documents, interviews, and participant observations, and provides the first descriptive history of local food movement national policy achievements in the US, from 1976 to 2013, and in the UK, from 1991 to 2013, together with reviews of both the American and British local food movements. It provides a US-UK comparative context, significantly updating earlier comparisons of American, British and European farm and rural policies.

This Local food grants report by University of Gloucestershire’s Countryside and Community Research Institute (CCRI) assesses the benefits created by the Local Food Programme using a Social Return on Investment (SROI) approach. The SROI approach was developed from social accounting and cost-benefit analysis. The outcome assessment is based on a ratio of benefit-to-investment calculation including social, environmental and economic values.

Old wine in new bottles: the winery Virginia Marie Lambrix has partnered with packaging specialists to create their new Truett Hurst PaperBoy wine bottle. The package replaces glass with recycled paper and all material inputs used in producing the bottle are included based on sustainability criteria. The outer shell is made of recycled corrugated waste and the thin plastic liner, screw cap closure, inks and other materials are all UV-based and do not contain volatile organic compounds.