Farmers in the UK are receiving only a tiny fraction of the supermarket price of five common foods - often receiving less than a penny of the purchase price - according to this report from UK NGO Sustain. Other stages of the supply chain - notably processors and retailers - often receive a much greater portion of the profit. The report also notes that growers could receive more profit by supplying through alternative supply chains, such as non-profit food hubs.

Research programme PASTRES (Pastoralism, Uncertainty and Resilience) has released six short briefing papers on the links between extensive, mobile pastoralist systems, biodiversity and conservation. Each paper is available in English, French and Spanish.

This paper reviews the evidence on how consumption of sustainable diets links to the risk of cancer in adults. It identified eight cohort studies, which were conducted in Europe and the United States and which used differing definitions of sustainable diets including definitions based on greenhouse gas emissions, food biodiversity, land use, pesticide exposure, adherence to the EAT-Lancet diet and score on a sustainability index. Most studies showed a modest correlation between higher adherence to sustainable diets and lower incidence of cancer and cancer mortality. However, most of the studies were considered to have a serious risk of bias because of confounding factors.

This paper argues that “agriculture for nutrition” interventions in low and middle income countries are overly narrow in scope and neglect the wider political, economic, social and cultural factors that affect food and (mal)nutrition.

This paper explores how the food industry was able to influence and weaken the 2018 Dutch prevention agreement on overweight, using documents obtained through Freedom of Information requests. It argues that so-called voluntary agreements - a form of governance developed through negotiation between public and private stakeholders - is too susceptible to industry influence, and that stronger public regulation is a better alternative.

A recording of the event “No More Omissions: Real Policy Action on Land Use, Animal Agriculture & GHGs–with a Focus on Methane” is now available. The event was held on 11 November 2022 at the COP27 Food4Climate Pavilion, organised by Brighter Green and the Global Forest Coalition.

This blog post from The Good Food Institute addresses the question of whether cultivated meat (and other lab-grown foods) can reduce the risk of antibiotic resistance compared to livestock production. Antibiotics are often added to cell culture media in laboratories to prevent infection, but over a dozen cultivated food companies claim to have antibiotic-free processes.

A group of campaigners known as Reboot Food has published a manifesto calling for open-source precision fermentation technology to be used widely to transform the food system away from reliance on animal agriculture and free up land for nature restoration. Precision fermentation technology, which is already used to produce insulin and rennet as well as some new food products, could in theory produce all of the world’s protein on an area of land smaller than Greater London, says the manifesto.

The United States Food & Drug Administration (FDA) has completed its first pre-market consultation for a food product made from cultivated animal cells. The cultivated chicken product, made by UPSIDE Foods, still has to pass further approval stages before it can be sold to consumers in the US, including inspection of the manufacturing facilities by the United States Department of Agriculture Food Safety and Inspection Service. The process described in the consultation documents uses genetic engineering, antibiotics and bovine serum at various stages, although antibiotics are not used in the main cell growth and differentiation phases.