This book explores the history of government food programmes in Britain over the past two centuries, including workhouses, school meals and the post-war welfare state. The book discusses how these programmes treated people differently, e.g. because of gender or race.

This report from the Global Resource Initiative Taskforce, commissioned by the UK government, looks at how the UK can reduce the climate and environmental impacts related to its import and consumption of beef and leather, cocoa, palm oil, pulp and paper, rubber, soya and timber. 

This report from the UK’s Royal Society synthesises existing evidence on the links between soil structure and four benefits: biodiversity, agricultural productivity, clean water/flood prevention and climate change mitigation. It also discusses measurement of soil structure and sets out policy recommendations.

In this paper, FCRN members Pip Brock and Daniel Tan examine how Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is used as a tool for informing resource-use decisions. They contend that two different schools of thought - natural resource management and planning theory - would benefit by learning from each other.

This paper uses several simple emissions scenarios to illustrate how GWP* (as opposed to GWP100) can report the warming created by both short-lived greenhouse gases such as methane (CH4) and long-lived greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2). 

This paper argues that substantially rebuilding the health of marine ecosystems is both necessary for human thriving and achievable within a generation. While marine ecosystems are under pressure from overfishing, pollution, oxygen depletion and other stressors, the authors point out that many remote areas of the ocean are still wild and large populations of marine mammals still exist and are capable of recovering if given the chance.

This blog post from the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition sets out the impacts that COVID-19 is likely to have on the food system in both low- and high-income contexts, including impacts on health, livelihoods and the cost of food transport. It also suggests how the food system can be strengthened to mitigate these challenges. See this table (PDF link) for a summary.

This blog post from the UK’s Food Ethics Council explores some of the ethical complexities in the food system’s response to COVID-19. It notes that many people are displaying compassion and supporting neighbours during the pandemic. It also argues that other ongoing crises, including climate, nature loss, health and the UK’s post-Brexit trade deal negotiations, must not be neglected.

This article in the Guardian explores the links between food production and COVID-19. It points out that, while the virus is likely to have been transmitted to humans via a pangolin at a “wet” market in Wuhan, China, the virus may have come to pangolins from wild bats. Some smallholder farmers, the article suggests, began to rear “wild” animals (such as pangolins) for income when their previous livestock farming was undercut economically by industrial farming methods, and may also have been pushed onto marginal land (nearer to forests, bats and the viruses hosted by bats) by industrial agriculture’s expansion.