This editorial in The Lancet argues that countries and people should “limit their consumption of intensively farmed meats”, discusses recent papers on the environmental and health impacts of meat production and consumption, and points out that policies to reduce meat consumption may have to be tailored to different contexts.

The Dutch government-funded healthy eating agency Voedingscentrum has launched a new campaign encouraging men who eat a lot of meat to reduce their consumption. FCRN member Corné van Dooren says that men, on average, could eat 400g less meat per week to meet guidelines, while women could eat 100g less.

In this report, the InterAcademy Partnership expresses concern over the current state of global food systems and nutrition, and also identifies science-based initiatives that could contribute to solutions.

Facial recognition could be used on pig farms in China to provide individualised feeding plans. The artificial intelligence system, created by a subsidiary of Chinese e-commerce company JD, can also track a pig’s growth, physical condition and vaccinations over its lifespan.

In this report, the Food Ethics Council analyses the 2018 Food Sustainability Index (view interactive graphics here), which ranked the UK 16th out of 28 European Union countries and 24th out of 67 countries when averaged across a range of food sustainability indicators.

The Food Ethics Council has created a new website about food citizenship, aimed at changemakers in the food and farming system, arguing that it is easier to influence the food system when people think of themselves as citizens rather than consumers.

The Food Research Collaboration argues in this report that every form of Brexit (for non UK readers, this is the UK’s upcoming departure from the European Union) will affect the UK’s food supply, and that Local Authorities should set up “food resilience teams” to assess local risks to food provision.

The US Global Change Research Programme has published the second volume of its Fourth National Climate Assessment, which examines the human welfare, societal, and environmental impacts of climate change and variability across many sectors, including agriculture.

FCRN member Helen Harwatt outlines a three-step strategy for shifting from animal to plant proteins as part of climate change mitigation strategies, arguing that not acting on livestock emissions would require unrealistically ambitious emissions cuts in other sectors.