The Metropolitan Area of Barcelona is a microcosm of the current international movement towards increasing urban food self-sufficiency, with the aim of promoting both supply chain resilience and social justice. In this blog post, Haley Parzonko reflects on the challenges and opportunities facing the urban agriculture movement in and around Barcelona.

Food insecurity in Africa is one of the continent’s major challenges, exacerbated by the ongoing climate crisis. In this essay, Dr Rejoice Chipuriro reflects on different types of food aid programmes across several countries in Southern Africa. She contrasts short-term food relief with approaches intended to promote longer-term food system resilience, discussing the importance of incorporating local values and knowledge systems.

About the author: Yolie Michielsen is a PhD candidate at Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands. She has a background in cultural anthropology (BSc), consumption sociology (MSc), and philosophy of culture (MA). Her PhD focuses on resistance in the societal transition towards reduced meat consumption. The first part of the thesis, written with co-promotor Dr. Hilje van der Horst (sociologist and human geographer), studies backlash against meat curtailment policies in online discourse.

TABLE's new summary series seeks to break down many of our classic explainers into brief format. You can find the download page for each summary at the links below.

Tanzania’s traditional livestock grazing systems are under pressure. As population growth and economic growth increase demand for milk and meat, farming is also facing the effects of both climate change and the allocation of grazing land to other uses including conservation and urban development.  Dr David Dawson Maleko, lecturer, researcher and consultant at Sokoine University of Agriculture, Tanzania, considers the potential solutions for enhancing milk and meat production in the face of these challenges. He discusses the challenges and trade-offs both of intensifying production and of government-led allocation of new grazing areas to herders.

In this blog post, Tamsin Blaxter and Tara Garnett explore the different ways that protein has acquired cultural associations and connotations over the last one and a half centuries. This draws on our longer report Primed for power, and readers should refer to the full report for more depth on many of the stories mentioned here.

The annual UN Climate Change Conference, COP27, kicks off this week. This year promises to be a landmark year for food systems dialogue at COP, with an unprecedented three pavilions in the food theme. Many hope that this will lead to a greater centering of food issues at this year's COP. TABLE has put together a list of resources we believe will be useful for anyone trying to follow along with food systems discussions at COP, whether you're a journalist, an academic, a policymaker, a practitioner or an enthusiast.