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New Foodsource building block: What is feed-food competition?
This building block explores key statistics about competing uses for food system resources, focusing on the use of land, crops and wild fish for feeding humans or feeding livestock – a trade-off known as feed-food competition. It also outlines different ways in which people interpret these figures and sets out how these differing perspectives link to broader debates about what we should eat and how we should produce food, particularly concerning what role (if any) livestock should play in the global food system.
The Food Climate Research Network (FCRN) conducts, synthesises, and communicates research on food sustainability.
We inform and connect stakeholders with a common interest in building sustainable food systems.
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What's new
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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.
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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.
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New Foodsource building block: What is feed-food competition? Should grains and other edible crops ever be fed to livestock, rather than directly to people? This is the question at the heart of the debate on feed-food competition - the tensions and trade-offs between using resources to feed people or livestock.
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In Fodder this week: A paper compares the nutrient content of plant-based meat analogues and traditional meat products, finding that the nutritional composition varies by brand and no general comparative conclusions can be drawn; the top five most likely global risks all relate to the environment, according to the World Economic Forum; and the World Resources Institute gives tips to food service outlets on nudging customers towards plant-based dishes.
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Featured FCRN publication: Food refrigeration: What is the contribution to greenhouse gas emissions and how might emissions be reduced?
This 2007 FCRN paper focuses on food refrigeration: what its environmental impacts are, how it has come to be so essential to the way we manage our food system, our practical and cultural dependence on this technology, and what we might be able to do to reduce its associated greenhouse gas emissions.
