In December 2014 the Food and Feed LCA database from PE INTERNATIONAL was released.  It includes over 350 cradle-to-gate and gate-to-gate LCI datasets representing the most commonly used food and feed products in different geographical regions:

Unsustainable patterns of consumption and production threaten global development and environmental well-being. Ensuring sustainable consumption and production should take a life cycle approach, and central to this is the development of product sustainability information (PSI). This publication provides four key recommendations in order to advance a coherent and context-relevant use of PSI that is useful for consumer decision-making:

The latest survey by the Food Standards Agency presents results on reported behaviours, attitudes and knowledge relating to food safety issues. It provides data on people’s reports of their food purchasing, storage, preparation, consumption and factors that may affect these, such as eating habits, influences on where people choose to eat out and experiences of food poisoning.

The UK’s Department of Health has launched a new, standardised but voluntary labelling scheme for displaying nutritional information on food products, the aim being to make make it easier for people to make healthier choices. The system when it goes on display will combine red, amber, green colour-coding and nutritional information to show how much fat, saturated fat, salt and sugar, and calories are in food products.

Poor households in developing countries are sometimes included in livestock programmes by humanitarian organisations whereby they are given a cow, a pair of oxen, or a herd of goats. This paper analyses the impacts on the food security of recipients in these kinds of programmes and finds that the effect is positive. 

In this article in The Conversation Tim Lang discusses two recent reports that have been published discussing food poverty and food banks in Britain.

The Livestock Research Group (LRG) of the Global Research Alliance on Agricultural Greenhouse Gases (GRA) and Sustainable Agriculture Initiative (SAI) Platform have together compiled information about greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation options currently available for the livestock sector, and produced a roadmap of emerging options based on current research. The aim is to help make progress on meeting global food demand while reducing the food industry’s contribution to global climate change.

Since this is a complex but very interesting paper, we’ve put together a more detailed summary and explanation of the paper’s approach and findings, together with some comments in this document here.  Our summary and commentary draws upon some very helpful insights from Professor Pete Smith at the University of Aberdeen and includes some useful commentary from Dr Marco Springmann at the University of Oxford – thanks to both.

Sentience Mosaic hosts live online debates where a variety of topics related to animal sentience are discussed. The description of the event was as follows: “Livestock production is responsible for a large proportion of global greenhouse gas emissions. Furthermore, livestock related gas emissions are expected to increase rapidly in coming years if no action is taken. Some propose that further intensification of animal production, in order to increase yield per animal, is the answer to reducing gas emissions. However, many argue that this is unethical and is not a solution.