This piece discusses the findings of a recent paper by de Ruiter and colleagues, Global cropland and greenhouse gas impacts of UK food supply are increasingly located overseas.  The full abstract and citation are provided below. This post is written by FCRN member Henri de Ruiter. Henri is a PhD Student at the University of Aberdeen and the James Hutton Institute. Henri graduated with a Master’s degree in Environmental Sciences from the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. He also holds a Bachelor’s degree in Behavioural and Neurosciences from the University of Groningen. His current PhD project considers the implications of meeting a healthy and environmentally sustainable diet for future land use.Henri would welcome your thoughts on the paper. Add a comment in the field below this blog-post, but note that you need to be signed in as a member to write a comment.

In this piece, FCRN member Professor Michael W. Hamm provides a short commentary on a paper featured and discussed previously by the FCRN. Full citation for the paper is as follows: (Tom, M, Fischbeck, P.S., and Hendrickson, C.T. (2015) “Energy use, blue water footprint, and greenhouse gas emissions for current food consumption patterns and dietary recommendations in the US” Environ Syst Decis, DOI 10.1007/s10669-015-9577-y).Mike is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Regional Food Systems at Michigan State University.For other blogs Mike has written for the FCRN, see: Feeding cities - with indoor vertical farms?, the 3 part blog-series on City region food systems and lastly, his post about the inclusion of sustainability considerations in the US dietary guidelines report.

This piece offers a review of nuances and contingencies in the current livestock sustainability discourse.This post is written by FCRN collaborator Elin Röös. Elin is a postdoctoral researcher at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences working for the Future Agriculture initiative at the same university, which is a strategic multidisciplinary research platform that addresses the sustainable use of natural resources with emphasis on agricultural production and food systems. 

The blog-post is the first in a two-part series on water. To read the follow up piece, where Dr Tim Hess from Cranfield University expands on the water stress footprint associated with different foods, read Post Two: Water footprint is the answer. Now what’s the question?This piece is written by FCRN member Brad Ridoutt who is a Principal Research Scientist with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Australia’s national science agency. He is an international leader in the field of life cycle assessment (LCA), which he applies to agricultural production, food systems and sustainable healthy diets. Dr Ridoutt is engaged in a variety of international initiatives related to sustainability assessment. This includes ISO (International Organization for Standardization) where he represents Australia on committees related to LCA and environmental labelling. He also leads a task force within the UNEP/SETAC Life Cycle Initiative which is establishing global guidance for developers of footprint metrics.NB. For an overview on terminology and the differences between water footprint and LCA, see the boxes below this text where more details are provided.   

This post focuses on insect farming for human consumption. With a research-for-development perspective, author Wendy Lu McGill examines the political, cultural, and regulatory aspects of how insect farming could work in places where insect eating is most common. This piece also compares these developments with how insect farming operates in the Global North as a novel food production practice. This is the first in a series of blogs on insects that Wendy will be writing for the FCRN. A second blog-post discusses the use of insects as feed for animals.This week we are pleased to publish the first blog-post from Wendy Lu McGill, a PhD researcher at the Plant and Agribiosciences Research Centre (PABC) working with Prof. Charles Spillane and Dr. Peter McKeown at the National University of Ireland Galway.

In this piece, FCRN member Tim Lang reflects on what Brexit means for the UK food system, sustainability and inequality. He calls for the food movement to organise by highlighting priorities, tasks, and areas of particular concern where joint action is needed. If you want to read more about Brexit implications for the food and agriculture sector, we have listed a number of resources on the topic in our latest newsletter.Tim Lang is Professor of Food Policy at City University London’s Centre for Food Policy. Hill farming in Lancashire UK in the 1970s formed his interest in relationship between food, health, environment, culture and political economy. He co-wrote Food Wars (2015), Unmanageable Consumer (2015), Ecological Public Health (2012) and Food Policy (2009).We very much hope that you will add your feedback, ideas and comments to this post. You will have to register as a member to comment on this post, but if you have already created a member profile, you just need to be sure you are signed in. 

In this piece, Wendy Lu McGill expands on her overview of insect farming by diving into the nuances of regional variance. You can read her first piece on insect cultivation here. Wendy is a PhD researcher at the Plant and Agribiosciences Research Centre (PABC) working with Prof. Charles Spillane and Dr. Peter McKeown at the National University of Ireland Galway.

This year, I have been lucky enough to have been awarded a Nuffield scholarship, which gives me an opportunity to spend 18 months travelling and studying in depth, on a topic which I am passionate about and that could potentially help to transform our industry for the future.  My topic is intimately connected to what I do as a day job, and is all to do with how we communicate carbon reduction schemes to farmers. My research is exploring two main questions

Food and its sustainable provisioning is becoming of increasing interest to researchers as well as policy makers world-wide. In the European context, sustainable food production and consumption has deserved particular attention and the EU research agenda has been devoted to various aspects of sustainable food system research. The term “sustainable diets” was introduced a few years back as “those diets with low environmental impacts which contribute to food and nutrition security and to healthy life for present and future generations” (FAO, 2012). Numerous researchers and practitioners have since taken on the challenge of defining what sustainable diets might mean in their particular context as well as integrating sustainability aspects into national nutritional recommendations (Gonzales Fischer and Garnett, 2016).