A pilot of environmental labelling on selected food products is launching in the UK in September 2021. The aim of the pilot is to test consumer responses ahead of a roll-out across the UK and European Union in 2022. The scheme is run by UK non-profit Foundation Earth and supported by supermarkets and food brands including Marks & Spencer, Sainsbury’s, Co-op Food, Nestlé and Tyson Foods. 

Industrial-scale supply chains in the fresh produce sector are forcing farmers to adopt environmentally damaging practices, argues this Food Research Collaboration blog post by Rebecca Laughton of the UK’s Landworkers’ Alliance. Laughton suggests that local or decentralised supply chains are a better option for farmers, for example vegetable box schemes that connect agroecological farms to consumers.

This book gives an overview of research methods used in the study of the relationship between food and digital and social media. Chapters cover textual analysis of websites and videos, digital ethnography, digital food networks, the influence of apps and social media on food habits, and digital archives and network analysis.

This book argues that glyphosate, the most commonly used weedkiller in the world, disrupts the gut microbiome and is linked to chronic diseases in humans as well as to soil degeneration and harm to wildlife.

This report from the Global Alliance for the Future of Food sets out a framework (and a worked example of using the framework) to guide the actions of individuals and organisations working on systems transformation. The framework is built around the seven principles of the Global Alliance, which are: renewability, resilience, health, equity, diversity, inclusion, and interconnectedness.

This report from the Global Alliance for the Future of Food calls for action in seven areas to transform the food system. The seven areas are drawn from a synthesis of the Global Alliance’s previous dialogue events and reports. For each area, the report also presents a “Beacon of Hope” - an example of the action being successfully implemented.

This report details a workshop held jointly by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) - the first collaboration between the two institutions. The workshop aimed to clarify the complex interactions between climate change and biodiversity. The report emphasises that these two issues must be addressed together.

This report from international non-profit GRAIN analyses all food and agriculture grants made by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, aiming to understand how the Foundation is influencing the food system. It finds that while most of the grants are supposedly targeted towards African farmers, most of the funding actually goes to groups in North America and Europe, including research, development and policy organisations. The report argues that the Foundation has a harmful influence and that its activities gloss over the knowledge, technologies and biodiversity that farmers in the Global South already possess.

This discussion paper from UN Nutrition examines the role that livestock can play in contributing to nutrition, particularly for young children and in low-income settings, and the impacts of livestock on the environment. It aims to go beyond blanket messages about livestock-derived food and instead provide a nuanced overview of how the role of livestock in sustainable healthy diets depends on local context and specific production methods. It concludes that some groups of people - such as those already eating high levels of livestock-derived foods - could improve both health and environmental impacts by reducing their consumption.