Home

Featured report: Grazed and Confused? It is safe to say that the debate over grass-fed meat has left people either polarised or confused. Is grass-fed better or is it worse for the climate? What’s actually true?

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 Christina O’Sullivan: Can we have our farmed salmon and eat it too? In this blog post, Christina O’Sullivan explores the natural resources that go into producing farmed salmon in Scotland, notably fish oil and fishmeal from wild-caught fish. She questions whether the industry's expansion plans can be sustainable and examines the link between salmon aquaculture and intensive production of other livestock such as shrimp and pigs. The blog post is based on Feedback's recent report Fishy Business: The Scottish salmon industry’s hidden appetite for wild fish and land.

New blog post by Tara Garnett: Has veganism become a dirty word? In this blog post, the FCRN's founder Tara Garnett examines why the word "veganism" has become a difficult, uncomfortable or dirty word to some environmentalists. She traces how perceptions of veganism have changed over the past couple of decades, noting that veganism's recent surge in popularity has given rise to a backlash whereby veganism is seen (by some) to be linked to intensive arable monocultures, an industrialised food system and alienation from nature.

In Fodder this week: A controversial series of review papers advises adults to continue current levels of red and processed meat consumption. The recommendations do not incorporate environmental or ethical concerns. Meanwhile, some areas of China and India are hotspots for antimicrobial resistance in livestock; the Food Ethics Council calls for people to think of themselves as “food citizens”, not just consumers or producers; and an open letter from the RSA Food, Farming and Countryside Commission urges the UK government to consider the environmental implications of any future trade deals.

Featured FCRN publication: Cooking up a storm: Food, greenhouse gas emissions and our changing climate

This 2008 FCRN report sets out what we know about the food system’s contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. Taking a life cycle perspective, it looks at how these emissions arise, both by life cycle stage (from plough to plate to bin) and by food type. It then explores the flip side of the coin: the global impact of a changing climate on how we grow, distribute, produce and consume food. It follows this with a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of and challenges for the life cycle analysis methodology upon which the report has drawn.