The importance of soil health for producing food and the complexity of life found within soil are increasingly visible in food systems debates. This paper investigates how the diversity of microbes within soils may be affected by warming climates.

This paper, co-authored by TABLE community member Hayo van der Werf, discusses which environmental issues, data, methods, formats and so on should be used in the environmental labelling of food in France. The motivation for the paper was to consider how the French government’s recent requirements to introduce environmental food labelling can provide relevant information that is feasible to gather.

This event was hosted by TABLE on 15 June 2022 and took the format of a panel discussion with: Dr Tara Garnett (director of TABLE and fellow of the Oxford Martin School); Helen Breewood, research & communications officer at TABLE & author of the explainer on ecomodernism; Linus Blomqvist, co-author of the Ecomodernist Manifesto, former director of the Conservation and Food & Agriculture programmes at the Breakthrough Institute & PhD candidate in Environmental Economics and Science at University of California, Santa Barbara; Sam Bliss, PhD candidate in natural resources at the University of Vermont's Gund Institute for Environment & president of DegrowUS.

This article in Greenbiz explains and discusses three common concerns about plant-based meat alternatives: that many alternative protein startups do not disclose their product’s environmental impacts; that alternative proteins are unhealthy because they are highly processed; and that alternative protein startups fail to disrupt the power structures of the economic status quo.

The global extent of farmland has peaked and is declining, according to this data visualisation from Our World in Data. The visualisation compares three different sets of data, which disagree on the total extent of agricultural land but which all agree that the peak occurred somewhere between 1990 and 2000. The decline in land use comes from pasture; croplands, on the other hand, are still expanding. In part, the decline in pasture extent is caused by a shift towards intensive grain-fed livestock rearing methods.

This history of Russia’s cuisine looks at the links between food and hunger, climate, politics, and social structures.

Focusing on dairy cattle, this book explains the factors contributing to animal welfare, makes the business case for improving welfare, and sets out case studies linking welfare to increased productivity.

This book argues in favour of using cultural change to shift human diets away from farmed meat and dairy products, on the grounds of health, environmental impact and animal welfare.

The Food Research Collaboration sets out the tools available to measure the sustainability of “sustainable food hubs” - initiatives that source food from producers and sell it to customers while upholding certain sustainability principles. The tools include Better Food Traders membership and accreditation, an evaluation framework developed by the New Economics Foundation, a framework by Shared Assets for assessing local economic resilience, a social impact toolkit developed by several organisations, and the Sustainable Food Trust’s Global Farm Metric.