Volume 3 Issue 10, October 2022

Laboratories around the world are racing to create the perfect piece of meat. But, questions remain about how cellular agriculture can help with the world’s growing agricultural challenges.

The burgeoning field of cultured meat is racing to achieve the minimal standards required for market access. We argue that the focus must shift to a higher, mission-based standard based on transparency and collective processes.

The proposed benefits of cultured meat fail to track our moral intuitions because they are focused on the practical aspect of cultured meat production and consumption. A virtue-oriented approach can show cultured meat in a different light.

Antibiotic use in livestock and aquaculture production is driving resistance to medically important antibiotics. Producing meat through alternative methods, such as cultivated meat, offers an opportunity to decouple antibiotics from meat.

Critics of cellular agriculture fear that sector growth will reinforce unjust food system dynamics. Food justice frameworks can inform development and evaluation of the sector’s contribution to fairer and more sustainable food systems.

Industry and governments are increasingly investing in cellular agriculture. However, the trajectory of these technologies is likely to reinforce many current food system problems, particularly power asymmetries.

Product-level life-cycle assessments together with global-level integrative scenario assessments can guide the cellular agriculture development process towards greater environmental sustainability.

Technical and social perspectives can highlight the interconnectedness of people, planet and profit in cultured meat production. The sector must engage in the socioeconomics and politics of their technology to avoid greenwashing and enact effective change.

We do not need to persuade people to eat less meat. We need to make delicious, affordable meat in a more sustainable way, argues Bruce Friedrich.

Locally grown agricultural products have been increasingly replaced by their mass market equivalents with consequences for people and the environment. This Perspective explores how multifunctional landscape products can support human well-being and sustainability by examining seven case studies worldwide.

Inedible crustacean waste can be utilized for chitin and chitosan extraction. This Perspective reflects on recent developments in chitin extraction and explores future chitin and chitosan applications within and outside the food system.

When plants are under stress, the over-accumulation of reactive oxygen species (ROS) leads to phytotoxicity and growth inhibition. This Review examines the current approaches of applying ROS-scavenging and ROS-triggering nanomaterials to plants to enhance stress resistance and explores their delivery pathways.

Hedonic responses to food odour may be rooted in evolution, associated learning or the physiochemical structure of odorants. Here, vanilla is used to study these mechanisms in an effort to understand why some flavours are universally liked and how that might be advanced in food science.

Global agricultural markets can partially compensate for halted crop exports from Ukraine and Russia by increasing wheat and maize production in other areas, but carbon emissions and global food insecurity will also increase.

Policies that centre principles of justice and human rights, specify inclusive decision-making processes and identify and challenge underlying drivers of injustice are linked to more just food system outcomes.

Simulated annual wheat yields during 1889–2020 show that, since the 1990s, Indian Ocean Dipole has replaced El Niño Southern Oscillation as the dominant climate driver across most of the Australian wheatbelt. The occurrences of more positive Indian Ocean Dipole events in recent decades resulted in severe yield reductions.

This study examines Arabica coffee production responses to key seasonal climate drivers, namely, temperature, precipitation, soil moisture and vapour pressure deficit, in 13 of the world’s most important producing countries. Through threshold regression and generalized additive models, threshold responses are identified that could translate into rapid coffee yield declines under climate change.