A new a two-year interdisciplinary project research project, Rurban Revolution, will ask whether ruralising urban areas through greening and growing can create a healthy, sustainable and resilient food system. The project, based at Lancaster University, will be run by Jess Davies. Thanks to FCRN member Lael Walsh for bringing this project to our attention.

Two letters in the journal Cell Metabolism respond to the recent paper by Hall et al., Ultra-Processed Diets Cause Excess Calorie Intake and Weight Gain: An Inpatient Randomized Controlled Trial of Ad Libitum Food Intake. See our Building Block on disagreements about ultra-processed foods here: What is ultra-processed food? And why do people disagree about its utility as a concept?

This report details the findings of a seven-month bike tour of rural communities in the UK carried out by the RSA Food Farming & Countryside Commission. It gives an account of rural life in the UK, covering topics such as extreme weather (and its impact on farming), housing prices, flood risk, sheep farming, closure of rural businesses and the potential impact of Brexit on trading across the Northern Irish border with the Republic of Ireland.

This open access book, by Anna Davies, uses case studies to examine the past and present of food sharing in cities.

One in five adults in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland experienced some level of food insecurity in 2016, according to this paper, with people who are younger, non-white, less educated, disabled, unemployed or low-income being more likely to experience food insecurity. Low-income adults had a 28% probability of being food-insecure in 2004, which by 2016 had risen to 46%.

This report from the UK think tank, the Food Foundation identifies ten statistics that illustrate the effect that the UK’s food system has on health, and makes recommendations aimed at ensuring that healthy diets are accessible to all.

Switching to an organic diet for six days significantly reduced the levels of several pesticides and pesticide metabolites found in the urine of the 16 participants of this study.

This piece from the New Food Economy interviews several researchers across the United States who have felt pressure from food industry bodies and funders.

This book, by the academic Marion Nestle, describes how the food industry uses nutritional claims to promote sales of particular types of food.