Reviews & Analysis

Consumer acceptance of novel and disruptive technologies is key to their implementation and to building capacity for transforming food systems. Using gene technology, nanotechnology, cultured meat and food irradiation as cases, this Review explores consumer acceptance through the frames of food neophobia, disgust sensitivity and cultural values.

Emerging fungal and oomycete pathogens pose a significant risk to global food security. This Review summarizes factors affecting pathogen introduction and spread and current disease control strategies, and highlights the direction that research must take to face the challenge of emerging crop pathogens.

Rehabilitation of degraded farmlands can have diverse benefits for sustainability, supporting rural livelihoods, economies, society and culture, as well as contributing to food security. A long-established agroforestry programme in Cameroon illustrates these benefits.

Food banks, food pantries and other emergency food operations are often overlooked in studies of food access. Their availability for patrons should not be expressed in terms of geographic coverage, but rather their capacity and hours of operation.

Crop yield is stagnating in many parts of the world, and climate change threatens the worldwide agricultural system. This Review presents a comprehensive overview of current development leveraging genomic analyses and revolutionary new plant breeding technologies to enhance food crop traits through agricultural biotechnology.

Technologies and systemic innovation are critical for the transformation of the food system. This Perspective identifies promising technologies, assesses their readiness and proposes eight action points to accelerate innovation.

The global trade of fish and fish products brings with it the challenge of identifying exposure to contaminants from imported products. Marine fish trade models can now quantify human exposure to persistent organic pollutants.

Pork production in East Asia is declining due to African swine fever. The effects of this epidemic are modelled, predicting global meat price increases and lower food security in China.

Current food production systems and diets do not support purely local food consumption around the world, even when trade flows are optimized.

Gender inequality, discriminatory laws and economic precarity persist for many women in the agriculture and food sectors. This Perspective frames the persistent malnutrition and food insecurity experienced in parts of South Asia, despite economic growth, in terms of social and political structures that inhibit the agency of women.

Textured soy protein can now provide scaffolding for bovine skeletal muscle cells to adhere to and form meat-like 3D cell cultures, thus advancing the generation of cultured meat and reducing the reliance on animal agriculture.

CRISPR technology has been widely used in plant genome editing and has great potential in precision breeding. The application of CRISPR technology to food crops provides potential for crop synthetic biology and crop domestication. The authors also discuss the implications of regulatory policy for deployment of the technology in the developing world.

Policy packaging offers citizens better scope for assessing trade-offs in policy attributes and policymakers the opportunity to make unpopular reforms, including those needed to achieve healthy and sustainable food system transformation, more palatable to their constituents.

Many cities have enough space to satisfy their population’s demand for fruits and vegetables. A conceptual framework based on the city of Sheffield, United Kingdom, highlights key challenges and opportunities for the realization of untapped urban horticultural potential.

Livestock products are under scrutiny from environmental, human health and animal welfare perspectives. Future policy decisions must address and represent the complexity of the interactions between livestock and the Sustainable Development Goals, and beyond.

Historical and projected impacts of tropospheric ozone and climate change on California’s most valuable perennial crops indicate that opportunities exist to improve crop yields through pollution mitigation.

An engineered increase in Rubisco production has increased photosynthetic capacity, rice yield and nitrogen use efficiency in an experimental paddy field. This demonstrates a key means to sustainably increasing yield and global food security.

To highlight vulnerabilities of future food production under climate change, we need a better understanding of crop yield variability drivers. Soil moisture, which plays interdependent roles in water demand and supply, determined from satellite observations can markedly improve the predictive skill of US maize yield models.

A comprehensive review of the constitutive nature, design approaches, structural properties and applications of food gels, pertinent to the food science, nutrition and health communities.

Transgenic corn expressing anti-inflammatory antibodies presents a new avenue for mitigation of the enteric disease coccidiosis, providing new possibilities for antimicrobial-free management of poultry diseases.