On 16 November 2020, the LSHTM Centre on Climate Change & Planetary Health and food-sharing app OLIO hosted a discussion on the priority areas where change can contribute to a net zero future of food, such as tackling waste in the current food system and switching to healthy sustainable diets. A video recording of the event is now available.

In this blog post from Agroecology Now! Patrick Mulvany of the Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience (CAWR) at Coventry University argues that agricultural biodiversity needs go beyond just seed diversity. Rather, he argues, there should be intentional diversity in many dimensions of agroecology, such as management practices, livestock breeds, forest species, support species, agroecosystems, soil organisms, pollinators, and so on.

According to a joint investigation by the Guardian, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and ITV News, leading UK supermarkets and food outlets including Tesco, Asda, Lidl, Nando’s and McDonald’s are selling chicken that has been fed on soy produced in Brazil’s Cerrado savannah, which is threatened by deforestation. The chicken producer in question, Cargill, says that it has broken no rules and that it does not source from illegally deforested land.

In this BBC Future piece, Emily Kasriel uses a communication approach called “deep listening” to better understand how dairy farmers think about climate change. Kasriel describes deep listening: “I try to be completely present, using deep listening. I focus on their words, but also try to sense the meaning behind them to better understand their world view.” She talks to dairy farmers who hold varying views about the validity of climate science and the future of the sector.

Lab-grown chicken meat produced by the US company Eat Just has been approved for sale for the first time ever. The Singapore Food Agency approved a production line of Eat Just’s GOOD Meat brand. This production line uses animal-based growth media (containing foetal bovine serum) because a plant-based alternative was not available at the time that the regulatory approval process started.

This book takes a broad, interdisciplinary look at current research on the food system, covering topics such as eating in restaurants, food poverty, school meals, public perceptions of the food system, and community food initiatives.

This report has been produced by the Farming for 1.5°C independent enquiry on farming and climate change for Scotland. It sets out a pathway to net zero for Scottish farming, arguing that farmers and land managers will have to “revolutionise current practices” to reduce environmental harm and sequester carbon, and that multifunctional land use management (including agroecology, restored peatland, planted woodland and multispecies pastures) needs to become the norm.

This report from the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations reviews - with the contributions of over 300 scientists - the state of knowledge on soil biodiversity, factors threatening it, and how knowledge of soil biodiversity can be applied to fields such as agriculture, food processing, ecosystem restoration and the pharmaceutical industry.

In this paper, Table member Erasmus Zu Ermgassen and co-authors use publicly available data to trace Brazil’s beef exports from 2800 municipalities to 152 countries, along with their deforestation links. The authors argue that, because of the high variation between the sources of beef for different trading companies, it is not advisable to rely on national level statistics when assessing environmental footprints.