Volume 1 Issue 5, May 2020

The Food Systems Dashboard brings together extant data from public and private sources to help decision makers understand their food systems, identify their levers of change and decide which ones need to be pulled.

Given the important role that nutritional science plays in global food and health policy, some of the key uncertainties in nutrition research that policy makers should take into consideration are outlined here.

Food Tank is a non-profit organization that champions people in agriculture. Co-founder and President, Danielle Nierenberg, discusses challenges faced by the farming community including youth engagement, equality for women and preservation of indigenous practices. Farming should be better supported to ensure security of food supply.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Food pantries are part of the emergency food network in the United States, but they are an understudied component of food access. The Pantry Accessibility Index and Individual Accessibility Index developed here allow measurement of the spatiotemporal availability of these services to the food insecure of south-central Indiana.

Food safety is jeopardized by the global trade in contaminated foods. Huang et al. demonstrate how consumer exposure to the toxic chemical polychlorinated biphenyl-153 (PCB-153) can be modelled and identify regions with high consumer PCB-153 exposure resulting from imported fish consumption.

Novel aquaculture feeds are rapidly developing, but their contributions to sustainable industry growth are unknown. Cottrell et al. model feed efficiency and fatty acid profiles, showing that replacing forage fish with novel feed ingredients could strengthen aquaculture’s role in global food security.