This book, co-authored by Table member Michael P. Hoffmann, uses a typical menu - from appetisers to desserts - to explain how climate change is challenging people in the supply chain who help bring food to grocery stores.

Table member Madeleine Diment has co-authored this feature in Food Science and Technology, which summarises key insights, themes and recommendations from the literature on how to create resilient food systems. It is based on interviews with food system actors, including representatives of hospitality, catering and government.

The research programme ‘Resilience of the UK Food System in a Global Context’ has launched an online hub. The programme aims to identify the major vulnerabilities of the UK food system and assess how its resilience can be improved. The hub gives details of its 13 research projects, lists programme outputs, and has sections for news and blogs and events.

This paper argues that the COVID-19 pandemic requires a policy response that significantly reforms the structure of the food system. It examines how policy responses to past food crises have shaped the present system, how COVID-19 is different to past food crises and which policy responses could build a more resilient future food system.

The UK’s Food, Farming and Countryside Commission has launched a new website called Trade Unwrapped, which aims to host conversations about “decisions being made about the UK’s new trading relationships and the impact they’ll have on our everyday lives.”

This paper examines how localised the US food system could become by calculating theoretical minimum foodshed sizes (i.e. average distance travelled by food) for 378 urban areas under seven different dietary scenarios. It finds that (on average) foodsheds can be smaller for the low-meat diets compared to high-meat diets.

US retailer Walmart, the world’s largest company by revenue, has announced a goal to become a “regenerative company”. Specific targets include protecting, managing or restoring at least 50 million acres of land (which is equivalent to around 2% of the United States’ land area) and one million square miles of ocean (<1% of the global ocean area) by 2030, and achieving net zero emissions by 2040. The net zero target appears to cover only Walmart’s direct emissions, not food and product supply chain emissions.

This paper, co-authored by FCRN member Simon Bager, assesses the sustainability practices of a sample of hundreds of companies in the global coffee sector, including producers, traders, roasters, processors and cafés. It reports that around one third of the companies have no sustainability commitments, another third have one to four commitments and the remaining third have five or more sustainability commitments.

The UK government has proposed a new law that would require large businesses to prove that their supply chains for commodities (including beef, cocoa, palm oil and soya) do not contain products that have been produced on illegally deforested land. The proposals would cover commodities embedded within other products, such as animals fed on soy or palm oil used as an ingredient.