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The reduction of food loss and waste is urgent, yet strict food waste regulations can be costly and unpopular. Drawing on a large set of survey experiments conducted in a high-income country, this study assesses the positive impact that specific policy framing, design and feedback may have on citizens’ level of support to these regulations.
Spatial planning and policy could guide China’s livestock sector towards reducing human exposure to ammonia—provided that 5–10 billion animals are relocated across the region.
Systems used to categorize processed foods display variation in the impact of highly processed food on risk factors for non-communicable disease. Clarity is needed on the contribution of nutrients, additives and sensory properties of foods categorized as highly processed to health and disease.
The pace of dietary shifts towards the EAT–Lancet dietary guidelines varies widely across countries. By analysing the supply of 15 essential foods in 172 countries over almost six decades, this Article estimates the level of convergence of national diets with the EAT–Lancet reference diet and the impact that closing such a diet gap would have on national and global water footprints.
Quantifying the long-term (LT) response of crop yields to nitrogen fertilizer is critical to improving nutrient management practices. Based on 25 LT field experiments, this study develops a generic LT nitrogen response function for global cereals to characterize the yield impacts, associated LT economic benefits and external costs of changing nitrogen inputs.
Overexposure to ozone compromises crop yields, yet accurate estimates of such impact in Asia have been hindered by limited empirical data. This study assesses relative yield losses of three main crops in Japan, China, and South Korea through O3 exposure–response relationships based on monitoring data and experiment-based sensitivities.
Animal-derived serum use in culture media is a financial, ethical and sustainability challenge for scaling up cultured meat production. Now, an omics approach has identified key cellular signals that allow myocytes to develop in the absence of animal serum.
A self-powered electrical stimulation system that harvests wind and raindrop energy has the capacity to stimulate crop growth via the all-weather triboelectric nanogenerator. A small-scale experiment shows that the system can increase ~26.3% of the germination speed and ~17.9% of yield for peas.
Bovine satellite cells undergoing myogenic differentiation in a chemically defined, serum-free medium are comparable to those undergoing serum starvation—demonstrating the suitability of this formulation for cultured meat production.
Capacity-enhancing fishery subsidies provided by emerging economies are supporting overfishing in the high seas and in the national exclusive economic zones of other states. Action must be taken to avoid detrimental impacts on livelihoods and food security across the Global South — before global fish stocks are depleted.
The exact contribution of alternative diets to climate change mitigation depends on several factors, including where these diets are adopted. This study quantifies avoided greenhouse gas emissions that would result from a shift to EAT–Lancet diets in 54 high-income countries through agricultural production and the restoration of natural vegetation in saved lands.
Conflicts are known to disrupt agriculture, food supply chains and the economy at large. Mapping and quantifying such disruptions, although key for aid planning, remains a challenge in war zones. This study uses daytime and night-time satellite data from Syria over 1998–2019 to assess the link between war-induced impacts on infrastructure and urban areas with cropland dynamics.
Feeding animals with low-opportunity-cost biomass — a principle of circular agriculture — may upgrade the role of cattle and pigs in sustainable and healthy food systems, as represented by the EAT–Lancet dietary recommendations.
In a circular food system, animals are solely fed with low-opportunity biomass, resulting in substantially smaller herds and lower animal production. Using a resource-allocation model, this study examines whether the adoption of circularity in the EU-27 + UK would meet requirements of the EAT-Lancet reference diet.