Reviews & Analysis

Technologies from synthetic biology can be applied to traditional practices in winemaking. Possibilities beyond natural microbial communities exist to improve predictive capabilities for the winemaker vintage to vintage, and introduce new characteristics to wine.

An analysis of historical Escherichia coli samples from livestock reveals how antimicrobial resistance can spread — and how understanding the biology underlying its spread can inform effective policy actions.

Trade-offs between land-based climate change mitigation efforts and food security are common to most decarbonization scenarios. Accounting for climate impacts and inclusive policy design can reverse this trend.

Chemical and pathogenic hazards in aquaculture supply chains threaten the provision of safe aquatic food. The Seafood Risk Tool is an integrated, semi-quantitative system that develops bespoke supply chain and risk management strategies.

Relocating livestock closer to croplands could increase opportunities for manure recycling and reduce the need for synthetic fertilizer — facilitating nitrogen pollution abatement and reducing the impacts of nitrogen pollution on human health.

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.

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.

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.

Building productive relationships between farmers and scientists is critical to developing new innovation pathways to solve the challenges of contemporary agriculture. On-farm experimentation (OFE) is an effective approach that brings agricultural stakeholders to support farmers’ own management decisions for agricultural innovation, with digitalization playing a key role in motivating and enabling OFE.

An anticipatory life-cycle assessment of industrial-scale ovalbumin production using Trichoderma reesei culture indicates that this cellular agriculture approach could have lower global warming potential than ovalbumin purified from egg whites.

Social disruption during the COVID-19 pandemic triggered highly varied changes in diet and lifestyle. It has offered a unique opportunity to study drivers of behaviour change in the general population, building the crucial evidence base needed to tackle major challenges for transforming food systems.

The merging of small farms into fewer large ones is a key part of China’s food security and rural revitalization strategy. Yet, the benefits of implementing large-scale farms vary under different land consolidation pathways.

Armed conflicts have devastating humanitarian consequences, both direct and indirect. A crucial yet overlooked outcome is the disruption of local agricultural production and the consequent erosion of food security in war-ridden regions.

Unfed bivalve mariculture could fill the gap in demand for nutritious and sustainable seafood. This Review explores the bivalve value chain, examining how improved production practices and food processing could address consumer requirements for increased food safety and greater availability of appealing bivalve food products.

GWP* is an alternative emission metric that better represents the short-lived character of methane, but its application is not straightforward and can have a substantial impact on the design of mitigation policies in agriculture.

Coupling micro- and nanotechnology-based diagnostics devices with machine learning would bring advantages in the food and agriculture sectors that will positively impact our planet.

Addressing trade-offs between the environment, health and inclusion in the quest for sustainable food systems requires integrated and coherent policies. This Perspective proposes a food systems transformation framework that brings these elements together and enables the design of concrete development pathways for food sustainability.

A new dataset that comprises more than 5,500 historical crop pest and disease records in China provides a unique opportunity to understand how climate affects crop pest and disease outbreaks.

Vertical farming systems have the potential to form a part of resilient food systems through the production of reliable, high-quality crops in urban landscapes. This Review explores how multi-layer indoor crop cultivation systems currently operate and the conditions needed to upscale and support their integration into mainstream agriculture.

Developing new modelling tools to support better design of climate change adaptation strategies offers an opportunity to harmonize crop production, climate change mitigation and environmental sustainability.