The UK’s Food, Farming and Countryside Commission has launched a new website called Trade Unwrapped, which aims to host conversations about “decisions being made about the UK’s new trading relationships and the impact they’ll have on our everyday lives.”

In this blog post on the Oxford Livestock, Environment and People (LEAP) website, FCRN member James Painter summarises his recent research on media coverage of animal agriculture and its links to climate change, and lab-grown (or cultured) meat as an alternative to meat eating. The research shows that media coverage of animal agriculture tends to focus on consumer responsibility as opposed to the role of governments or large farms.

This book (publication date 30 October 2020), presents interdisciplinary insights on the controlled release of fertilisers, including chapters from researchers in the fields of agriculture, polymer science, and nanotechnology.

This book (publication date 23 October 2020), takes an interdisciplinary look at groundwater management and sustainability. It covers some food-relevant topics, including the sustainability of groundwater used in agricultural production and trade and the political economy of groundwater irrigation in India.

In this report, international non-profit Forum for the Future calls for “a just transition to a regenerative agriculture system” in the United States. The report, funded by the Walmart Foundation, identifies opportunities and barriers to scaling regenerative agriculture in the US.

This report from the non-profit Good Food Institute reviews the current status of fermentation technologies in the alternative protein industry. It covers traditional fermentation (e.g. tempeh, cheese, yoghurt), biomass fermentation (where microbial biomass is used as an ingredient, e.g. the filamentous fungi in Quorn) and precision fermentation (where a specific component is extracted from the biomass, e.g. Perfect Day’s dairy proteins and Impossible Foods’ heme protein).

This report from the EAT Forum examines current food consumption patterns and finds that most national dietary guidelines do not integrate both health and environmental sustainability. It finds that halving food-related greenhouse gas emissions in G20 countries by 2050 would contribute towards equitably feeding 10 billion people within planetary boundaries.

This report from the UK charity the Food Foundation sets out ten metrics which could be used to gauge the health of the UK’s food system. Compared to 2019, the report finds improvement in the following metrics: wages in the food industry, products with too much sugar, and products with not enough vegetables. Deterioration has been seen in food prices (note that figures are only available until the first quarter of 2020 and thus do not capture the full impacts of COVID-19) and in places to buy healthy food.

This paper co-authored by FCRN member Emma Garnett finds that placing vegetarian options first on the counter of student cafeterias increases their sales by 5-6% when the different options are widely spaced (>1.5m), but not when the options are close together (<1.0m).