The European Environment Agency has published a report on food systems approaches for the seafood industry in Europe, with the explicit aim of making ‘a first contribution to the collective endeavour of rethinking Europe's food system for sustainability goals’.

In this article co-written by FCRN member Erasmus zu Ermgassen, the authors use what they call a holistic approach (described below) to estimate the GHG emissions savings from preventing UK household food waste. In particular, they include the consideration of a potential rebound effect: the GHG emissions that result from money saved (because of reduced food waste) being spent elsewhere.

In this paper, the authors present an analysis of the nitrogen cycle in the agricultural production system of 12 world regions. From these results, they go on to suggest improvements in nitrogen use by changing the role of human diet, international trade and local production.

The FCRN and the Food Foundation have jointly produced new report based on a meeting, held November 2016, on the topic of metrics for sustainable healthy diets for the food industry. While a range of sustainability metrics for this industry already exists, none comprehensively measure the progress (or otherwise) that food companies are taking to foster a public shift towards more sustainable and healthy eating patterns (SHEPs). The meeting report considers whether further work on such a set of metrics would be of use.

While regulation aimed at improving food products has traditionally focused on decreasing unhealthy ingredients such as salt or sugar, a new move to aid food producers to include healthy ingredients is on the way. At a recent workshop organised by Euractiv it was discussed how the addition of, say, protein or fibre in processed food could be policy goal as well.

The Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef (GRSB), a global, multi-stakeholder initiative developed to advance improvement in sustainability of the global beef value chain, held a conference in October 2016. 

David Baldock, a Senior Fellow and former Executive Director of IEEP, gave a Food Thinkers talk at an event organised by the Food Research Collaboration, entitled: "Horses and Carts: can policies in a post Brexit world harness farming to more sustainable diets?"

Edited by Marlyne Sahakian, Czarina Saloma and Suren Erkman

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