MILK, the inaugural issue of Feminist Food Journal, a new quarterly online magazine focused on the intersections of food systems and feminism, explores feminist perspectives on the contested liquid. Through diverse global perspectives, it considers what a feminist milk paradigm could look like and contemplates how we could get there.

The Alliance of Bioversity International and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) has published a recording of a webinar held on 28 January 2022, titled “Building a vision for achieving net-zero food systems by 2050”. It discusses non-CO2 emissions trends in the food sector and their implications for achieving climate targets.

This paper considers how people could be fed in the event of a sudden reduction in sunlight - for example, caused by a volcanic eruption, an asteroid strike, or nuclear war. These triggers could cause global agricultural output to collapse through abrupt falls in light, temperature and precipitation. The paper identifies foods that could still be produced under these conditions, and assesses their potential contributions to nutrition.

This paper analyses the annual reports and websites of 12 leading food and beverage companies and finds that a number of artificial intelligence (AI) enabled methods are being used to “nudge” consumer behaviour or choices, for example by changing the position of options on menu boards, automatically suggesting additional products based on a customer’s current choices, or using virtual-reality-based marketing.

This paper outlines the systemic risks of using artificial intelligence (AI), specifically machine learning (ML) models, in agriculture and proposes ways of mitigating those risks. The three categories of risk considered are: risks related to data; risks related to the narrow optimisation of ML models; and risks linked to deploying ML models at scale.

This paper reviews the evidence on interventions that can increase or decrease consumption of animal-source foods. It finds that providing information on the environmental impacts of meat can reduce consumption, as can - to a more limited extent - providing information on health and animal welfare impacts, emphasising social norms such as trends towards plant-based eating, and reducing meat portion sizes.