This book looks at how a “second generation” of local food movements aims to make the global food system more socially just and healthy.

This book argues that traditional nomadic herding practices offer lessons for regenerating a healthy planet and producing food sustainably.

This report from Forum for the Future, based on a series of interviews as well as desk research, identifies barriers to food supply chain transformation in the UK as well as options for voluntary action and policy to support change.

This report from The Royal Society sets out a “multifunctional” approach to land use (with a focus on the UK) - i.e. an approach that considers how land can produce not only goods with a market value (such as food) but also a wide range of products and services that for the most part do not have a market value (e.g. biodiversity provision, carbon sequestration and flood alleviation).

This paper maps the global potential for producing 34 varieties of seaweed and uses five scenarios to model the impacts of expanding the use of seaweed for human food (10% of diets), animal feed (10% of intake), transport fuels (50%), all three of the previous uses, or supplementing ruminant feed (0.5% of feed) to reduce enteric methane production and increase feed conversion efficiency.

This paper explores how the agricultural sector in the European Union (EU) might be affected by partial shifts in European consumers’ diets towards the EAT-Lancet reference diet. The impacts vary by sector, with the production of animal-sourced foods likely to fall and production of fruit and vegetables likely to increase. Overall, agricultural income is projected to rise as a result of the dietary shifts.

This paper critiques the narrative of soil carbon sequestration as a win-win solution offering climate mitigation as well as improving multiple “soil functions” such as fertility, biodiversity and water retention. It argues that accounting for the likely saturation of soil organic carbon over time significantly reduces the estimated potential contribution of soil carbon sequestration to climate mitigation. Furthermore, it finds that the literature does not show a general positive association between soil organic carbon sequestration and improved crop yields - rather, the effects on yields can be positive, neutral or negative depending on the situation.

This study assesses the associations between the consumption of ultra-processed foods (as defined by the NOVA classification system) and the incidence of and mortality from 34 specific types of cancer, as well as overall cancer risk, in a sample of nearly 200,000 British adults. After correcting for a wide range of confounding factors such as smoking status and physical activity levels, greater UPF intake was found to have a statistically significant association with overall cancer incidence and mortality, as well as with some (but not most) of the specific cancers assessed.

Researchers from the Agricultural Research Organization - Volcani Center in Israel have developed a genetically edited hen that lays eggs from which only female chicks hatch. The genetic editing works in such a way that the female offspring do not carry any of the edits themselves. Any male embryos in eggs carry a different chromosome that stops their development at a very early stage when the eggs are exposed to blue light. The news has been welcomed by Compassion in World Farming, which says the technology could avoid the current system of slaughtering male chicks shortly after hatching.