Volume 1 Issue 11, November 2020

Food systems are driven by incentives that often lead to food being discarded before entering the market and to the degradation of natural resources. Vegetable production in the water-scarce province of Almería, Spain, illustrates this and highlights the need for policies ensuring ethical and environmental sustainability standards.

A series of in vitro, ex vivo and in vivo studies show that starch structure and plant tissue intactness control glucose release from pea-based foods. Modification of these characteristics through plant breeding and food processing may provide opportunities for enhanced food formulation, but challenges for labelling and communication.

An assessment of the climate vulnerability of the UK’s fruit and vegetable supply is a useful starting point for considering the health, environment, and social trade-offs of international trade in food.

Effects of national policies on crop yield and nitrogen losses can be disentangled from environmental conditions using spatial discontinuities between international borders.

Climate change increases the frequency and severity of drought in many agricultural regions. A novel big-data approach has been designed to shed light on the interactions between agronomic and environmental factors affecting the sensitivity of crop yields to drought.

Feeding infants with formula requires heating water and bottles for sterilization and formula preparation. Plastic infant feeding bottles are commonly used, and now their potential to release microplastics has been explored at a global scale.

Traceability is key to food quality and safety, but its wider implementation is hindered by high costs and technical complexity. A newly proposed mobile-based bidirectional system based on information concatenation through products’ 2D barcodes offers an effective, cheaper and more flexible alternative.

Aquaculture must develop within planetary boundaries. Experience from agriculture, such as in managing monocultures and using genetically modified crops, can inform sustainable solutions for aquaculture.

Palm oil has certain functional advantages as an ingredient in food products, including textual and sensory properties, and as a trans fat replacement. A well-established technique, enzymatic glycerolysis, is used here to structure liquid cottonseed and peanut oils into solid fats without altering fatty acid composition, which may advance the structure, nutrition and sustainability of commercial products

Seeds, flour and food products derived from two near-identical pea genotypes (BC1/19RR and BC1/19rr) were utilized in a series of in vitro, ex vivo and in vivo studies to explore the contribution of starch structure, food matrix and intestinal environment to postprandial glycaemia.

Fruit and vegetable supply in the United Kingdom has increasingly been characterized by reduced domestic production of fruit and vegetables and increased reliance on imports from climate-vulnerable countries. With increasing climate change, this may impact availability, price and consumption of fruit and vegetables in the UK, with health consequences, particularly for older people and low-income households.

Global geospatial datasets and a regression discontinuity design enable the country-level effects, such as agricultural policies, on crop yields and nitrogen pollution to be quantified. The influences of countries were much larger on nitrogen pollution than on crop yields.

Understanding major sources of uncertainty in yield change facilitates adaptation strategies for cropping systems. Using eight crop models, 32 global climate models and two climate downscaling methods, it is shown that their relative contribution to uncertainty in climate–crop modelling depends on location.

A key climate change adaptation goal in agriculture is to reduce drought sensitivity of crop yields. A comparison of two empirical strategies applied to US maize for detecting changes in drought sensitivity reveals the advantages of utilizing within-country spatial variability in drought exposure, driven primarily by differences in soil water-storage capacity.

Oil uptake during deep-frying of potato crisps can be modified by the presence of short amylose chains. The choice of cultivar and processing conditions that enhance levels of short amylose chains may facilitate the production of reduced-calorie crisps.

Polypropylene-based food containers are utilized widely, but their potential to degrade and produce microplastics is poorly understood. Here, microplastics released from formula preparation procedures in polypropylene feeding bottles are quantified, demonstrating the potential for global infant exposure to microplastics.