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Plating Up Progress: New Investor Briefing Plating Up Progress, a project run jointly by the FCRN and the Food Foundation, has launched a second report proposing metrics for assessing progress towards healthy and sustainable food. 

New blog post by Hibba Mazhary: Distancing death: slaughter, welfare and consumption in the British halal meat industry In this blog post, Hibba Mazhary outlines her research plans on meat consumption and production in the British halal meat sector, including consumer motivations and the relationship that consumers have with animal death. She argues that the 'distancing' of consumers from animal death is particularly interesting in the halal meat sector due to disputes over the method of slaughter, both within the British Muslim community and amongst critics of non-stun slaughter.

New blog post by Martin Rowe: Moving Beyond the Impossible: Challenges of cellular agriculture In this blog post, Martin Rowe draws on research encapsulated in his paper, Beyond the Impossible: The Future of Plant-based and Cellular Meat and Dairy, which he wrote for Brighter Green and the Vegan America Project. He notes some of the challenges accompanying the development of cellular agriculture and plant-based alternatives to animal-sourced foods, discussing technological progress, consumer acceptance, continued upward trends for global meat consumption, entrenched interests and farming livelihoods.

In Fodder this week: Establishing oil palm plantations on former pasture land, instead of cleared rainforest, could be an almost carbon-neutral way of expanding palm oil production; clarification of the level of fires and deforestation in the Amazon rainforest; and 85% of UK food shoppers think it is fairly or very important for supermarkets to source their products ethically and sustainably.

Featured FCRN publication: Metrics for sustainable healthy diets: why, what how? This 2016 paper, produced jointly by the FCRN and the Food Foundation, highlights some of the questions that need to be considered when thinking about the role, nature and value of metrics for healthy sustainable diets and who their intended target users should be. It provides a detailed overview of one particular potential user: the investment community.  One section of the report provides an explanation of how the often poorly-understood investment community operates.