According to this story in the Guardian newspaper, hundreds of farming and human rights groups are planning to boycott the United Nations Food Systems Summit, which is due to take place in September 2021. The Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples’ Mechanism, which represents civil society organisations working on food security, has raised concerns that the Summit may be too strongly influenced by corporate interests, lacks sufficient emphasis on human rights, and underestimates the extent to which food systems must be transformed. The Mechanism intends to set up alternative talks to run in parallel with the Summit.

This report from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) examines three questions: how have food systems performed to date and what role did policies play? How can policy makers design coherent policies across the triple challenge of providing food security, livelihoods and environmental protection? How should policymakers treat the facts, interests, and values that often complicate the task of achieving better policies? It also presents case studies on the seed sector, ruminant livestock and processed foods.

This book argues that transitioning from today’s industrial food system towards a more sustainable system requires cultural shifts. The author draws inspiration from themes in the Homeric epics to propose a new environmental governance model based on “eco‐states responsible for agroecological management”.

The Nordic Food Policy Lab has produced an online “Cookbook for systems change”, co-authored by former Table colleague Marie Persson. Using a “mission-based” approach, the Cookbook sets out strategies that can be used to trigger food systems innovation. It is primarily aimed at national and regional government innovation bodies, but also discusses the role that entrepreneurs, civil society and researchers can play.

This book, published February 2021, uses case studies from across the globe to discuss the future of food. Chapters cover food and place identities, politics of agricultural production, food trade, hunger and malnutrition, food insecurity in rich countries, and future scenarios for sustainable food and farming.

This paper reviews the effectiveness of government obesity policies in England for the period 1992 to 2020. It finds that these policies have tended to rely on the behaviour changes of individuals and avoid more interventionist approaches, that governments do not regularly assess the effectiveness of past obesity strategies, and that obesity has not become less prevalent despite 14 different obesity strategies being published over the period of study.

This paper outlines the political, economic and cultural factors that present a challenge to efforts to reduce the consumption of red and processed meat (RPM), particularly in high-income settings. The study focuses mainly on high-income countries such as the US, UK, Australia and Sweden.

This report by the Cornell Atkinson Centre for Sustainability and Nature Sustainability examines the technological scope for moving to food systems that are healthy, equitable, resilient and sustainable. It finds that successfully scaling up promising technologies depends on specific “biophysical, political, socio-economic, and cultural contexts”, and therefore proposes creating “socio-technical innovation bundles” that are customised to the relevant context.