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 report from climate non-profit Project Drawdown discusses how food, agriculture and land use contribute to greenhouse gas emissions, and how the sector can both reduce emissions and sequester carbon. Suggestions include conserving and restoring tropical forests, making animal and rice agriculture more efficient, using fertilisers more efficiently, reducing food waste, eating plant-rich diets, intensifying agriculture to spare land for conservation and ecosystem restoration, using regenerative cropping and grazing techniques to build soil carbon, and using perennial crops.

This policy brief from UK food waste NGO Feedback recommends that policymakers reform the Scottish salmon aquaculture industry and support the expansion of unfed aquaculture, such as mussel farming.

This study, co-authored by Table member Dr Toni Meier, measures the nutritional value, environmental impacts and food waste associated with catering facilities in Hesse, Germany. The project examined company canteens, prison kitchens and a restaurant run by a vocational training institute. 

This open access article examines the impacts of avocado production, specifically water stresses and socio-economic impacts on local communities in production areas. The paper links the increase in popularity of avocados to the conversion of forest to avocado production in Mexico. The avocado trade also supports thousands of jobs that are paid above the average for the main production regions, while subsistence farming has been displaced to more marginal lands.

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, co-authored by Table member Ken Giller, investigates the soil organic carbon stocks of oil palm plantations in Sumatra, Indonesia under a variety of management practices. Plantations using “best management practices” were found to have the highest soil carbon stocks, at 68 t ha−1. Plantations with smallholder management practices had the lowest soil carbon stocks, at 46 t ha−1, while those with current standard management practices had stocks of 57 t ha−1.

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 podcast from the US-based Migration Policy Institute interviews Dr Megan Carney, anthropologist and director of the University of Arizona’s Centre for Regional Food Studies, about the links between climate-related food insecurity and people’s decision whether to migrate.