This paper reviews the potential contribution of microbial foods to a healthy, resilient and sustainable food system. It covers three main categories: traditional fermented foods such as wine, yoghurt and kimchi; microbial biomass, where the microbes themselves are directly consumed, for example the mycoprotein used in Quorn products; and “cell factories”, otherwise known as precision fermentation, where microbes are genetically modified to produce certain molecules.

Hannah Ritchie, Head of Research at Our World in Data, has launched a new email newsletter called Sustainability by numbers, which discusses the numbers and data that are important for building a sustainable world. TABLE readers may be particularly interested in the issues Eating local is still not a good way to reduce the carbon footprint of your diet and Are meat substitutes really better for the environment than meat?

Using satellite imagery, this paper characterises the impacts of nitrogen oxide pollution on crop growth - a relationship which has remained poorly understood until now. Consistently negative impacts of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) on crop greenness (which is correlated with growth and yield) were found across five major agricultural regions. The authors estimate that crop yields could be increased by reducing nitrogen dioxide pollution.

This report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reviews the evidence on climate change’s impacts on ecosystems, biodiversity and people. It finds that there is a greater than 50% chance that global warming will reach or exceed 1.5°C (above the 1850-1900 baseline) in the near term, even under very low emissions scenarios, and that human-induced climate change has already caused “widespread adverse impacts” for nature and for people.

This paper attempts to quantify for the first time the planetary boundary for “novel entities” (NE-PB), including chemicals, new types of materials and modified forms of life. It focuses on chemical pollution, in particular plastics, and concludes that we fall outside a “safe operating space” for this planetary boundary.

The UK-based Food Research Collaboration has put together a map of food research institutes in the UK that study food systems and food policy. It is aimed at academics seeking fellow subject specialists and at civil society and journalists seeking experts on food systems topics. 

This feature in The Guardian newspaper profiles the work of Oritain, a firm that assesses whether the geographical origins of products such as tea, fish, beef, apples, cotton and wool match the claims made on their labels. This is possible because regions often have unique ratios of elements, which can then be detected in the product. The feature discusses how the technology has been used to detect fraud, as well as its limitations with regards to the environmental or social impacts of production.

This report from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations argues that Indigenous Peoples must be included in debates on the future of the global food system, such as the 2021 United Nations Food Systems Summit, and that Indigenous Peoples’ food systems are in many ways aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. 

This paper, co-authored by Jeroen Candel of TABLE, reflects on how to improve the interface between science and policy in the global food system. It discusses the recent finding of a European Commission report that there is a gap in the global food systems landscape for a platform that integrates and coordinates food systems knowledge, and questions how such a platform might operate effectively.