Reviews & Analysis

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.

The gap between global supply and demand of omega-3 fatty acids is twice previous estimates. Opportunities to narrow that gap include increasing use of fishery by-products and reducing food waste.

Climate tipping points, such as the collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), could drive significant structural changes in agriculture, with profound consequences for global food security.

The wealth of national food supply data, collected over decades by member states of the Food and Agriculture Organization, provides intriguing insights into regional transitions.

Up to now, creativity, ingenuity, time and more than a little luck have been essential for transforming a wild plant into a new food crop. Building on the understanding of gene function in Arabidopsis, the process of domestication can be rapidly accelerated.

Trade agreements can constrain or enable governments’ ability to implement food system-level actions aimed at improving nutrition and mitigating climate change. The technical and political aspects of trade agreements that interact with food systems are reviewed here, and the coherence between trade policy goals and public interest goals, such as nutrition and climate change, is discussed.

Diet and policy approaches to curb obesity and type 2 diabetes can be contentious and confusing. This Review synthesises state-of-the-art and emerging evidence on diet and health, reflects on policy and reconciles the evolution of the discipline of nutritional science with changes in dietary advice.

Advances such as machine learning may enable the full biochemical spectrum of food to be studied systematically. Uncovering the ‘dark matter’ of nutrition could open new avenues for a greater understanding of the composition of what we eat and how it relates to health and disease

A consistent global gridded multi-model assessment of wheat production under climate change points to large uncertainties arising from crop models, particularly in mid and high latitudes.

This Perspective builds on the concept of full-chain nitrogen use efficiency to propose policy interventions and criteria that target major actors in the agri-food chain.