This paper examines three scenarios for animal-source food production in the European Union under two constraints: halting all imports of soybeans and soybean meal used as animal feed, and not using any additional land for animal feed cultivation (either inside or outside the EU). 

This paper provides an overview of the environmental impacts of pet food production at the global level. It finds that, depending on the data source used, dry pet food production accounts for 1.1-2.9% of global agricultural emissions, 0.8-1.2% of global agricultural land use, and 0.2-0.4% of agricultural water extraction.

Table members Ximena Schmidt Rivera, Sarah Bridle and Christian Reynolds have co-authored this paper, which finds that the cooking method used to prepare foods at home in the UK can account for up to 61% of total emission for some food types, and that emissions from cooking can be easily reduced. The paper is based on a survey of how UK consumers actually cook various foodstuffs, as opposed to recipe recommendations.

This paper calculates externalities - specifically, costs of climate change from greenhouse gas emissions - of categories of food produced in Germany. It finds that animal-based products (both conventional and organic) have the highest external climate costs (€2.41/kg product), followed by dairy products (€0.24/kg product for conventional and €0.19/kg product for organic), and finally plant-based products (€0.04/kg product for conventional and €0.02/kg product for organic).

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.