The UK has many of the ingredients considered necessary for food system transformation: a substantial evidence base, active organisations across sectors, growing policy attention and broad recognition that the food system needs to become healthier, more sustainable and more equitable. Yet progress remains slow, fragmented and difficult to see at the scale or pace required.Our project findings identify three complementary routes to change: policy, market, and local or citizen-led action. UK changemakers default to the policy route, but often combine different routes, while narrative and cultural change cut across all of them.Five recurring barriers stall progress in the UK: complexity and contested evidence; attachment to the status quo and fear of change; lack of long-term ‘funded leadership’; unequal power and political risk; and research agendas that can be too top-down or impractical.Crucially, UK changemakers did not simply ask for more research. They wanted better synthesis and translation of evidence, more practical understanding of what works and how change happens, earlier involvement in shaping research, stronger coordination across sectors, and longer-term, more flexible funding.The central challenge is not a lack of activity or ideas. It is connecting existing knowledge, organisations and opportunities to sustain action over time.A brief version of this report can be found here.The main report, authored by TABLE and partners under this same project, can be found here. National reports are also available for France, Ireland, Spain and Poland.

This brief is a summary of Stuck in Motion: Why UK food system transformation is more than a knowledge problem, authored byRachel Headings, Tara Garnett, Christian Reynolds, Monika Zurek and Roger Sykes and in partnership with Pierre-Marie Aubert, Valérie Noel, Amanda Harding, Johanna M Gelejinse and Sander Biesbroek. The full report, including citations and references, is available here.

Protein is having another moment in the sun. In this piece, Tara Garnett and Tamsin Blaxter unpack the current narratives around protein: that we need more protein, that we need different protein, or that we need to stop talking about protein altogether. These stories shape conversations about the wider food landscape and the future of food.

This report, funded by the Agile Initiative, presents insights from a year of engagement with UK food system stakeholders and experts to unpick the ambiguity of Regenerative Agriculture (Regen Ag). It considers if, how, and to what extent Regen Ag could support the pursuit of local, national and international goals for the UK food system, and what policy interventions might facilitate this role and help to avoid the potential pitfalls associated with this contested concept. This is the final report of the Reckoning with Regeneration project. https://www.doi.org/10.56661/1b736799

Alternative proteins - and especially novel APs like cell-cultured meat and precision fermentation - are the subject of some contention in food system debates. For advocates, they may offer a way to produce animal products with fewer environmental and ethical harms, an accessible first step towards dietary diversification and change, or a tool to challenge the economic dominance of the industrial livestock model. For critics, they might smack of techno-credulity, be a distraction that will prop-up an ultra-processed and industrially-produced status quo, or a threat to valued modes of living and means of producing. In this report, based on three webinars hosted by TABLE in the summer of 2025, we outline these polarised positions and try to go beyond them. What diversity of views do we find within advocates and critics? Where is there overlap and agreement between those who are concerned and those who are optimistic? What are the more nuanced, and perhaps more achievable, futures for APs that we should be discussing?https://www.doi.org/10.56661/6238c4bc

This report examines the factors that energize or restrict debates on food systems in Colombia in the context of the multi-stakeholder conversations between the Government, rural organizations, agribusiness and academia. To answer the question, we address two main aspects. First, we analyse the perceptions of various stakeholders about food systems in the country, based on a workshop carried out in February 2024 and focusing on priority issues such as hunger and malnutrition, deforestation and biodiversity loss, the effects of climate change, and inequality. Second, we discuss the competition or complementarity of various axes at the centre of food systems discussions: large-scale agriculture and family farming, native seeds and genetically modified seeds, and local food systems and international trade. The report concludes by drawing attention to the challenges of public policy coordination, information gaps, and the great diversity of actors, visions, and values in the discussions.

In October 2024, TABLE brought together a diverse range of stakeholders across the food system with the aim of exploring how they envisaged a better food future, and what system transformations would be needed to get there. The participants included non-governmental and civil society organisations, policymakers, philanthropists, community leaders, and academics from diverse disciplines. Over the course of the workshop, they together discussed, developed and refined different visions for the future of the food system based on three initially conceived visions: market-led, state-led, and bottom-up. This report synthesises the workshop methods and dialogue process, the discussions participants had and the areas of agreement that emerged. https://www.doi.org/10.56661/421fa6df

At TABLE, we select annual themes to guide our work. These are usually concepts that act as fault lines in discussions of food system transformation, and concern what a ‘good’ food future might look like. Through a series of reports, essays, podcasts, events and explainers we consider the concept from many different angles. We hope that the totality of this work helps reveal the range of values, assumptions and evidence that shape stakeholders’ views and illuminates how and why they may disagree. TABLE’s report at the close of our SCALE theme noted that power was at the root of many concerns about localised or globalised food system approaches. Power is of course a too-big topic, encompassing not only its operation, mechanisms, handlers and impacts, but also what it is and how it is to be identified and redistributed. We approach the concept from multiple angles and via diverse modes of analysis to give a sense of its multifaceted nature. In a collection of 17 podcasts, TABLE asked contributors from a range of disciplines, professional backgrounds and ideological positions to tell us how they understand power and see its operations in their work. Our essays and blogs expanded on these and offer case studies and personal reflections. Our events gave contributors a chance to interact: An open discussion on power asked how participants see power fitting into conversation, while in Whose knowledge counts speakers asked how power might determine what we take as evidence. Lastly, we considered TABLE’s own experience of power in Process and Power at TABLE. Power can be a slippery concept to evaluate and discuss. To give it some materiality, we took protein as a case study, exploring how power has maintained this ‘charismatic nutrient’ at the centre of ideas about nutrition, development and farming. TABLE’s reports add a historical lens to consider how power has structured cultural understandings of protein when it comes to funding, research and international development strategies and activities in Primed for Power: a short cultural history of protein. The Investment, Power and Protein in Sub Saharan Africa report examined financial investment in protein production in sub-Saharan Africa, reflecting on how those cultural narratives are still informing resource distribution. You can explore all the Power materials on the project page. However, this theme is not hard-edged and many other resources on TABLE deal with questions of power. You can also explore our other themes of SCALE and NATURE, and the MEAT: the Four Futures project.https://www.doi.org/10.56661/d98edcaf

As part of the launch of the dialogue platform MESA Mexico, an international collaboration project that seeks to explore and understand the different perspectives on the present and future of agrifood systems, an on-site and virtual workshop was held to identify the main problems of Mexican food and agriculture. It is in this context that the results of the workshop are presented, with the intention of reflecting and deepening the discussion on the top three issues selected as the most important by the participants, in order to open the dialogue and debate on the most relevant issues of agrifood systems in Mexico.