Few food practices draw more intense debate than whaling. In the case of grindadráp, the traditional Faroese form of whaling, this debate plays out almost every summer in bloody images in tabloid newspapers around the world and calls for the tourist industry to boycott the islands. But beyond the headlines, this is a complex, challenging issue that raises questions about what a truly local, sustainable food future could look like. In this TABLE blog, Tamsin Blaxter, researcher and writer at TABLE, explores some of the issues around the grind, both from the perspective of animal rights and conservation, and food traditions and local identity.

About the author: Rob Percival is the author of The Meat Paradox: Eating, Empathy and the Future of Meat. He works for the Soil Association as Head of Food Policy, leading the organisation’s advocacy on dietary change.

Farmers are at the forefront of the transition to a sustainable food system, facing both pressure to change their practices and the risks of a warming climate and soil degradation. But what does it take for a farmer to act, when individuals often have little power to solve systemic problems?  In this blog post, Viola King Forbes discusses her research into factors that enable British farmers to adopt sustainable farming practices. She finds that subsidies and financial capital, a farming culture that values nature, family support to weather judgement from their communities, and online groups with which to share advice are all important in supporting farmers to make the changes they want. About the author: Viola King Forbes coordinates both the Livestock, Environment and People (LEAP) and HESTIA programmes, and also manages the Future of Food Network at the Oxford Martin School. She graduated with a B.A. (Hons) in Geography from the University of Oxford, where she became interested in sustainable food systems and the research-policy nexus. Her undergraduate research looked at farmers’ experiences of changing their production practices and she has since worked on a farm to gain some practical experience. She is also particularly interested in wider questions about our relationship with nature and how it may be reframed in the Anthropocene, and will be starting her MPhil in Anthropocene Studies at the University of Cambridge in October 2022.

What is the role of food advertising in the context of net zero? In this blog post, Trish Fisher summarises a recent TABLE debate and reflects on the issue of greenwashing, alternative economic models such as B-corporations, government regulation of sustainability claims, and the challenges for the advertising industry of redefining a “good life” that is compatible with sustainability goals. This blog post is written by Trish Fisher, an intern at TABLE working on multiple projects. Currently, she is a graduate student at the University of Michigan pursuing dual master’s degrees in public policy and public health. Trish’s research interests lie at the intersection of climate, food, and health policy.

May 2022: This call has now closed. Thank you to everyone who has submitted a proposal. TABLE is issuing a call for proposals, open to anyone who is affiliated with an organisation based in Central and South America, Africa, the Middle East or Asia. To explore some of the most salient and relevant food debates happening in and around food systems across the world, we are looking for writers who are able to lay out the landscape of these food debates as they occur in different geographical locations, the stakeholders involved, and the underpinning evidence, values and assumptions that lie at the heart of these contestations.

Dr Keren Papier is a Senior Nutritional Epidemiologist working in the Cancer Epidemiology Unit (CEU), based in the Oxford Department of Population Health, at the University of Oxford. Her research at the CEU includes investigating diet and disease associations using large-scale cohort data (including the Million Women Study, EPIC-Oxford and the UK Biobank). She is also the principal investigator for the Feeding the Future Study (or FEED).

Dr Abigail Muscat works at Wageningen University and Research, where she completed her PhD assessing the roles of science and policy in addressing trade-offs between different uses of biomass (e.g. food vs feed). at the Animal Production Systems group. She is passionate about transforming food systems so that they are healthy, equitable and sustainable for all.