News & Views in 2022

Food systems must transform to provide undernourished people with greater access to nutrient-rich foods. While there has been a push to increase volumes of food production, too little attention has been paid to the factors that enable access to nutritious aquatic foods.

Nano-enabled fertilizers and pesticides can bring new economic benefits to agricultural practices with reduced environmental impacts. Moving forward, nano-enabled agrochemicals should continue to be optimized for greater efficiency.

Meeting future food demand while mitigating the social and environmental externalities associated with the agricultural sector will require creative, multi-scalar and synergistic strategies.

The EDGAR-FOOD database presents a way forward in quantifying the impacts of air pollutants emitted from the global food system on human health and crops.

Farm animals in circular food systems upcycle non-competing feedstuff and therefore reduce feed–food competition. This can increase global food supply while reducing pressure on the Earth’s system.

Working across agriculture–nutrition domains, nutrition balance sheets provide farm-to-fork estimates of the availability of dietary nutrients for human consumption.

Food systems change across space and time. Lessons to steer food systems towards sustainability can be drawn from studying the drivers and implications of these changes through a systems-based food system classification (typology).

A precision compost strategy (PCS) has been proposed to improve soil fertility and achieve higher yields. For wider adoption of the PCS, costs and environmental trade-offs need to be considered, knowledge dissemination enhanced, and financial incentives implemented.

The discovery of a natural variation in an ancient rice variety shows the way to reduce the harmful element cadmium in a key food without sacrificing yield and concentrations of other essential nutrients.

Nuclear weapons obliterate targets. The soot ejected into the stratosphere spreads, changing global weather patterns. When weapons are especially high yielding, the resultant soot could trigger global famine.

Simulation studies can provide valuable input to governance actors when choosing which measures to adopt in the pursuit of food security. However, such studies often neglect spillover effects and rarely simulate the targeted nature of governance interventions or factor in value-chain dynamics.

Advancing wheat sowing dates has a large benefit to crop yields in the Eastern Ganges Plain of India. The contribution of better crop calendar management to yield gains should be studied more extensively around the world, especially in underperforming regions.

Nutrient security in the United Kingdom appears to be stable and secure, but it is unclear whether this will continue to be the case if dietary patterns change, or if new trade arrangements emerge.

In silico cultivar selection estimates that the global potential wheat yield may be doubled. However, there remain many challenges in leveraging the yield potential into practice.

Principles encompassed in ‘less but better’ meat could shift meat production and consumption towards greater sustainability. A systematic review identifies inconsistencies in the term’s definition and explores different interpretations that could lead to a shared vision of meat within food systems.

Food production in a given solar footprint is limited by the efficiency of natural photosynthesis. Now, a hybrid electrochemical–biological artificial photosynthesis system demonstrates the potential for food synthesis from CO₂ and electricity, enabling a paradigm shift in food production.

A cost-effective, high-throughput fibre-based food packaging approach using non-toxic, biodegradable biopolymer materials offers a strategy to considerably increase food safety and security while minimizing food waste.

Trade enables food access and is therefore key to achieving global food security. However, greenhouse gas emissions associated with food transport are many times higher than what was indicated by previous estimates.

Climate change will severely influence the yield, production and water demand of processing tomatoes. Atmospheric CO₂ concentration may offset, but not fully compensate, the adverse effects of elevated temperatures.

Improving manure management can reduce nitrous oxide (N₂O) emissions, but its impacts on indirect N₂O emissions and other greenhouse gases need to be assessed. Structural changes that address livestock demands and spatial planning are needed.