Poet and essayist Aimee Nezhukumatathil delves into the world of food in this collection of short essays that explore the intersection of food and nature; evoking memories through the tastes and smells of food.

Marc Edelman details the history and main objectives of global agrarian movements including farmer protests, peasants’ rights debates, and the categorical definition of “peasant” on the global stage.

This report by the World Resources Institute, a global research non-profit funded by Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Bezos Earth Fund and the Rockefeller Foundation, highlights the trade-offs and counterfactual of sourcing less and better meat as a strategy for food companies to mitigate climate impacts in their supply chains. It explores a key tension in the meat debate, also highlighted in TABLE’s Meat the Four Futures podcast, that production systems associated with ‘better meat’ such as organic, often lead to higher land-use and GHG emissions per kilo. 

This report by the Rockefeller Foundation explores recommendations to boost agricultural production and nutrition in line with the Vision for Adapted Crops and Soils (VACS). The report finds that more than 700 million people globally are undernourished. It calls for investment in underutilised indigenous and traditional food crops as a means to strengthen resilience to climate change and improve nutrition in Africa

This report on the global food crisis, aimed at humanitarian and development stakeholders and policymakers, provides detailed and interactive data related to global food insecurity and food-crisis across 59 countries or territories. 

This review explores the potential of combining two significant conceptual frameworks, the food systems approach (FSA) and the One Health approach (OHA), in aiding the management of zoonotic diseases such as COVID-19. Both FSA and OHA take holistic approaches to complex problems, but the authors note they also have blind spots. The researchers seek evidence as to whether the combination of these two approaches could better manage zoonotic disease outbreaks in the future. They conclude noting that the integration of One Health and food system approaches may help overcome challenges of operationalizing One Health and lack of inclusion of health issues and zoonotic diseases in food systems. 

This literature review explores the extent to which gender inequalities are considered in climate change policies, investments, and interventions related to food systems. Climate change has differential impacts on men and women. Whilst the findings suggest a growing body of literature related to potential interventions, more work is required to fully assess the trade offs and barriers of actions aimed at improving gender differentiated climate outcomes. There is also a considerable lack of research on the intersection of gender, climate change and food systems, with most previous research limited to looking at the role of gender in agricultural production.

This study explores how the impacts of pig farming co-vary in different pig production systems across Brazil and the UK. It argues that the externalities (consequences that affect external parties) of pig production have historically been examined in isolation, and trade-offs have never been robustly investigated. Based on 91 widely varying farms, the authors find that no particular farming type, from organic to indoor intensive, free range to woodland - performed well across all the main impact categories examined; greenhouse gas emissions, land-use, antimicrobial use and animal welfare. However, it finds that individual farms performed well across the categories. Therefore the study concludes that efforts to minimise trade-offs should focus on lowering impacts within system types rather than only changing between them.

The report, produced by Nature Friendly Farming Network and the Wildlife Trust, finds that a modelled reduction of farming inputs; pesticides, fertilisers and animal feeds, would result in commercial gains for 165 UK farmers. They refer to this balancing act as the ‘Maximum Sustainable Output’ -- the point where a farm achieves maximum output while harnessing the natural resources available to it.