The Cities & climate change science conference event was held in Edmonton, Alberta on 5-7 March. Recordings of some of the sessions are available here.

This book by Parke Wilde gives updated information on food policy in the United States. The second edition includes more detail on food justice and economic methods.

This book, edited by Fabricio Chicca, Brenda Vale and Robert Vale, calculates the environmental impacts of lifestyles around the world. FCRN readers may be particularly interested in Chapter 10, which looks at food.

In this paper, the authors conducted a review of numerous studies to examine the content, advantages and limitations of a frame-based approach to assist consumers in reducing their intake of conventional meat (e.g. eating less meat or different meat, such as organic or certified for animal welfare or environmental impact). Particularly, they want to evaluate whether behaviour can be shifted by creating new frames and to identify frames that can bridge a transition by highlighting ‘push’ factors away from routine meat eating, or ‘pull’ factors towards encouraging the consumption of alternatives.

UK farmers may be given targets to reverse soil damage and restore soil health by 2030, as part of an agricultural bill to be brought before parliament later this year.

This article examines the toxicity of ‘adjuvants’ in pesticides. Commercial pesticide formulations contain the active ingredient and various other chemicals - adjuvants - such as surfactants, antifoaming agents, preservatives, solvents and dyes. Adjuvants are generally neglected by health risk assessments of pesticides in the United States and the European Union. This paper uses the examples of glyphosate and neonicotinoids to illustrate that adjuvants can result in pesticides being significantly more toxic than the active ingredient alone. The paper calls for changes in regulation.

A report (PDF link) tested bottled water in nine different countries and found that 242 out of 259 bottles contained small pieces of plastic. The report suggests that at least some of the plastic particles may be coming from the packaging or the bottling process.

This report from the UK NGO Sustainable Food Trust shows that one in three small abattoirs in the UK have closed in the last decade, which could mean that marketing locally-produced, traceable meat will not be possible in some areas.

Walmart has developed a machine learning tool to predict when fruit and vegetables will spoil and make supply chains less wasteful.