Volume 2 Issue 12, December 2021

The transport of live animals across European Union (EU) member states indicates socio-economic benefits of moving animals instead of meat, in spite of animal welfare. In the revision of EU animal welfare legislation for farmed animals, socio-economic reasons for long-distance, cross-border live animal transport should be considered.

Start-ups are now the predominant source of innovation in all categories of food technology. Venture capital can accelerate innovation by enabling start-ups to pursue niche areas, iterate more rapidly and take more risks than larger companies, writes Samir Kaul.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Big data collected through apps can facilitate large-scale study of diet and lifestyles. Information from the ZOE COVID Study indicates the variety and extent of impacts that the COVID-19 pandemic has had on the diets and lifestyles of adults in the United States and the United Kingdom.

Owing to its short atmospheric life, methane’s contribution to agricultural emissions and climate change may vary substantially depending on the temporal scale considered. Based on projections from three agricultural economic models, this study reveals how different appreciations of methane’s global warming potential may affect the cost-effectiveness of carbon pricing and low-meat diets.

Accurately determining the concentrations of NH₄⁺ and NO₃⁻ in the soil is important for optimizing nitrogen fertilizer application, but the standard laboratory testing approaches are expensive and slow. A low-cost technology that combines point-of-use sensor measurements, weather and timing data with a machine learning model can rapidly and accurately determine and predict soil nitrogen levels.

Conflicts pose a serious threat to food security. Using remote sensing, this study reveals the location and extent of war-related cropland abandonment and its impact on food insecurity in South Sudan from 2016 to 2018—and offers a basis for timely aid provision.

Population growth and dietary changes affect ammonia emissions from agriculture and the concentration of particulate matter in the atmosphere. This study quantifies the adverse health impacts associated with these processes in China using a mechanistic model of particulate matter formation and transport. It also compares them with direct health impacts of changing diets upon premature death from food-related diseases.

An anticipatory life cycle assessment of ovalbumin produced using cellular agriculture demonstrates sustainability gains with limited trade-offs, particularly when produced using low-carbon energy sources.

The consolidation of small farms into large-scale agricultural enterprises may have important socioeconomic and environmental consequences. Based on 40,000 rural surveys, ecological modelling and geostatistical analysis, this study assesses the spatial feasibility and cost-effectiveness of land consolidation in China, and its impact on a set of sustainability indicators.