This is a reposting of a blog-post by FCRN’s Tara Garnett for the Women’s Environmental Network, 1st August 2017. We are reposting it with permission and the original post can be found here.Dr Tara Garnett initiated and runs the Food Climate Research Network at the University of Oxford. Her work focuses on the contribution that the food system makes to greenhouse gas emissions and what could be achieved by changes in behaviour.  

While one patty sizzles on the grill, another bleeds onto your plate – but neither contains any beef. Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods are two start-up companies making waves for their recent innovations in plant-based “meatlike” burgers.

The UK’s fresh fruit and vegetable supply system is vulnerable to water-related risk.  In this blog-post Cranfield University’s Chloe Sutcliffe and Tim Hess introduce a new project, part of the “Resilience of the UK Food System in a Global Context” (GFS-FSR) programme, where they investigate these risks. 

In our recent study, Life cycle assessment of cricket farming in north-eastern Thailand, we found that cricket farming has fewer environmental impacts than broiler chicken farming. This finding does not come as a surprise since crickets are biologically and physiologically different from vertebrate livestock species, and other studies have drawn similar conclusions (see for example journal papers here, here and here). However, this study is the first of its kind to conduct a life cycle assessment on insect farming for human consumption on a commercial scale.

There’s a new kid on the block of scientific breakthroughs with potentially revolutionary applications: the CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing system. But what is it, how might it be applied in agriculture and what are the implications of this application? Below we provide a summary of the many potential applications and implications of CRISPR-Cas9 technology, a brief overview of the science behind it, and most importantly a guided tour of what we think are the most useful resources on this topic, tailored towards FCRN members seeking to find out more about CRISPR-Cas9 in agriculture.

Mapping and dissecting the sustainable diet problem is among the ultimate interdisciplinary scientific tasks of today. I don’t say that lightly. For the last 20 or so years, the evidence that diet is a driver of some of the major challenges facing humanity has grown, not diminished. And the scale of the task has quietly dawned on all who monitor and explore the nature of food’s impact on society, ecosystems and economy.

Newly published analysis from Oxford University and from Public Health England confirms just how little red & processed meat (-75%) and cheese (-85%) and foods high in fat & sugar (-53%) we should be eating compared to average British diets; and how much more fruit & vegetables (+54%) and beans & pulses (+85%). For fruit and vegetables that means the ‘at least 5 a day’ message should be ‘at least 7 a day’. These are in addition to the much more publicised goal of cutting sugar by half.

Farm animals consume over a third of global crops but only deliver 12% of the world population’s calories. This is not just an inefficient use of crops but can also carry huge environmental costs when land is cleared and forests are cut down to make way for livestock feed crop production. For example, a whopping 88 % of soybeans in the UK are imported from Brazil, with virtually all of soybean meal eaten by livestock (97% globally). Possibly even more worrying is that fish that is perfectly good to be eaten by people in West Africa is taken out of local markets that cannot compete with the prices Western feed producers pay for the local catch.