Volume 3 Issue 9, September 2022

The dietary and health impacts of ultra-processed foods can be understood across the nutri-biochemical, food and dietary pattern levels. Each level reveals distinct dimensions and characteristics that can inform our scientific analysis and policy responses accordingly.

Working across agriculture–nutrition domains, nutrition balance sheets provide farm-to-fork estimates of the availability of dietary nutrients for human consumption.

Food systems change across space and time. Lessons to steer food systems towards sustainability can be drawn from studying the drivers and implications of these changes through a systems-based food system classification (typology).

Farm animals in circular food systems upcycle non-competing feedstuff and therefore reduce feed–food competition. This can increase global food supply while reducing pressure on the Earth’s system.

A precision compost strategy (PCS) has been proposed to improve soil fertility and achieve higher yields. For wider adoption of the PCS, costs and environmental trade-offs need to be considered, knowledge dissemination enhanced, and financial incentives implemented.

Understanding the relationship between the production of farmed Atlantic salmon and the use of marine resources is imperative for planning the future growth of this industry and the sustainable management of these marine resources. This study demonstrates that the Atlantic salmon aquaculture industry can grow without the input of additional marine resources.

This Perspective proposes a strategy for making Chinese food systems more sustainable, taking into account the interlinkages between agricultural production and food consumption across the supply chain and going beyond agriculture-focused perspectives.

Dietary quality is reported at the global, regional and national level across 185 countries. Though diet quality increased modestly since 1990 at the global level, in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa it did not improve. In some regions, children’s dietary quality is lower than that of adults.

Farm to fork supply of bioactive compounds in food is traced for 173 countries over 60 years, and the availability of nutrients is compared with nutrient requirements of populations at age–sex distributions. This accounting method identifies nutrient gaps to be filled from from food production, trade, fortification and supplementation scenarios.

This study presents a machine learning-based methodology to estimate the current state of food insecurity globally using secondary data on economic shocks, extreme weather events and conflicts. By predicting the prevalence of people with insufficient food consumption or at-crisis or above-crisis food-based coping levels when primary data are not available, the proposed model is a valuable tool for food aid efforts.

Optimizing biomass use by reducing food–feed competition is paramount to achieving sustainable food systems. This study assesses global food systems in terms of livestock and aquaculture feed use and the availability of food system by-products and residues to quantify the potential for replacing food-grade feeds with food system by-products.

A global meta-analysis identifies the key predictors of compost on crop yield, soil organic carbon and nitrous oxide emissions. The proposed precision compost strategy has the technological potential to increase the production of major cereal crops by 4% and restore 26.5% of current topsoil soil organic carbon stocks on a global scale.

An empirical model captures and separates influences of water-supply and temperature stresses on global crop yields. Soil moisture is shown to play an important role in determining variations in global agricultural productivity.

Food system typologies enable the comparison of food systems transitions in terms of structural drivers of change and outcomes in sustainable development.