Currently browsing posts about: Food-systems

NOTE: Nancy Matsumoto is speaking today at NYU at 3:30, 411 Lafayette, 5th Floor, Manhattan.  RSVP HERE

Nancy Matsumoto.  Reaping What She Sows: How Women Are Rebuilding Our Broken Food System.  Melville House 2025.  322 pages.

I did a blurb for this book.

Women play enormously important roles in food systems and in the food movement, but are often overlooked. Matsumoto brings women out of the shadows and highlights the efforts of a wide diversity of women in the United States and in low-resource countries throughout the world to create food systems healthier for people and the planet.

Nancy Matsumoto interviewed women doing wonderful work with grains, supply chains, grass-fed cattle, fish, cacao and coffee, grape and agave, and more.

From the chapter “Fighting Big Food on the Produce Front: Women Wranglers of the Alt Supply Chain”

One example [of regulations that favor industrial agriculture] involved progressive California legislators’ attempt to rid farm communities of toxic nitrogen in their groundwater. “There are lots of small communities in the Central and San Joaquin Valleys where residents can’t drink their water because there are so many nitrates in it and that’s directly related to runoff from chemical fertilizers,” Redmond [Judith, of Full Belly Farm] explains. But the paperwork required to comply with this regulation was geared toward giant chemical fertilizer–dependent farms growing a single crop, or monoculture, not a farm like Full Belly that strives for diversity. It was easy for a mega almond farmer, for example, to plug in one set of numbers, but much harder for Full Belly—with its eighty different crop varieties that harness the power of the sun and complex ecological interactions to build soil carbon—to comply with the regulations

From the chapter, “Women of the Grain, Grape, and Agave: Regenerative Beverages”

When I drop in on MISA’s [Minnesota’s Institute for Sustainable Agriculture] offices at the University of Minnesota to visit executive director Helene Murray and local writer Beth Dooley, they ply me with coffee, local raspberries, and packets of popped Kernza. Dooley’s contribution to the MISA effort is her cookbook, The Perennial Kitchen, centered on Midwestern perennial grains, nuts, and seeds, and regeneratively farmed vegetables, poultry, and livestock. Murray tells me about efforts to increase Kernza’s small seed size, which will make cleaning and threshing much easier, and to address the five-foot-tall plant’s propensity for “lodging” or toppling over. While Kernza gets most of the attention, she points out that there are many other grains the institute is researching and promoting. To counter some of the hype around Kernza as the poster grain for regenerating soil and ecosystems, she adds, “there’s no silver bullet.”

Reports about one or another aspect of food systems are issued constantly and are hard to keep up with.  Here are links to two major sources.

I.  The International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems.

This group produces impressive food-system reports at regular intervals.

Its most recent is Fuel to Fork: What will it take to get fossil fuels out of our food systems?

Our food system is hooked on fossil fuels. From fossil-fuelled fertilizers and pesticides to plastic packaging, ultra-processed foods, and long-haul cold chains, fossil fuels are entwined at every link in the food chain. Food systems now consume 40% of all petrochemicals and 15% of fossil fuels globally – making them a key growth frontier for Big Oil. Yet food remains glaringly absent from the climate conversation…This report sets out what it will take to break that addiction – and why it must start now.

II.  FAO Committee on World Food Security, High Level Panel of Experts  

This group produces reports aimed at faciliating policy debates and policy making.  Its most recent is Building Resilient Food Systems (September 2025)

This report addresses the urgent need to enhance food system resilience amidst escalating environmental, political and economic challenges. It provides focused and action-oriented policy recommendations to build resilient food systems capable of withstanding shocks and stresses…The report highlights the need to shift…to approaches aimed at “bouncing forward” by means of transformative changes that address structural and systemic vulnerabilities…In sum, the report calls for immediate and sustained action to build food system resilience and ensure the right to food for all and the well-being of the planet for future generations.

My former NYU colleague, Corinna Hawkes, who now directs the Agrifood Systems and Food Safety Division at FAO in Rome, sent a link to its new publication, Transforming Food and Agriculture through a Systems Approach.

This publication provides an organizing framework for applying a systems approach to the transformation of food and agriculture. Building on evidence from systems science and practical real-world examples from countries, it identifies six core elements of a systems approach and specifies key practices and shifts needed to implement in practice. It includes examples from across the world of how systems-based practices are already being taken forward at different scales.

This publication is about food systems, why they matter, and how to use a food systems approach to improve food quality and access.

It is beautifully illustrated.  The definition:

And here’s how it works.

There is much more in this report.  I view it as a how-to manual. Use it!

Resources

• Download the publication: https://doi.org/10.4060/cd6071en
• Dr. Hawkes’ Tweet and Post about the report
• Register for briefing sessions: 12 September (11-12 CEST) or 15 September (15-16 CEST)

I’ve gotten way behind on posting reports, so I thought I’d take care of several today.  These international reports on one or another aspect of food systems are all worth a read.

The UK Food Resilience report: Just in Case: 7 steps to narrow the UK civil food resilience gap

This is Tim Lang’s masterful analysis of what the UK needs to bounce back after interruptions to its food supply.  The UK currently depends on emergency services from police, ambulance, firefighters, and rescue services, but these “have next to no engagement on food matters.” The report considers who and what is needed to make sure populations have enough to eat during crises of one kind or another.  There is much useful to be learned here.

The U.K.’s food strategy (Thanks to Lindsay Graham for this one)

This document sets out the context and key challenges facing the food system, a high-level vision of what the UK food system of the future looks like, its approach to a patriotic campaign to realise that vision, what will make the vision a reality, and the next steps that need to be taken.

Health & Global Food Systems: An Investor’s Guide (Thanks to Carlos Monteiro for sending)

The Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group — the world’s seventh-largest bank with US$2.8 trillion in assets — explains in detail why ultra-processed foods pose major risks to food sector investors, and urges them to push companies to cut reliance on these products.

IFPRI’s 2025 Global Food Policy Report | Food Policy: Lessons and Priorities for a Changing World

This report examines the evolution and impact of food policy research and assesses how it can do better. Written by IFPRI (International Food Policy Research Institute), it explores a broad range of issues and research related to food systems, from tenure and agriculture extension to social protection, gender, and nutrition to conflict, political economy, and agricultural innovation, and more.  A textbook!

That’s enough for today.  More to come!

Stuart Gillespie.  Food Fight: From Plunder and Profit to People and the Planet.  Canongate, 2025.

I wrote a blurb for this book:

From his years of experience working in international nutrition, Gillespie has on-the-ground knowledge of why and how global food systems lead to widespread hunger, obesity, and environmental damage, and what needs to be done to make those systems healthier for all.  He makes it clear that this food fight is crucial to take on.

I particularly like his discussion of what is needed to transform food systems:

‘Food system transformation’ has become the mother of all development clichés in this decade.  The real goal of many who invoke it is not real transformation—it’s more about fiddling on the fringe.  To truly overhaul the food system, we need to see a major shift in the structure and dynamic of power.  Unsurprisingly, those in power now don’t really want such a shift, whatever they proclaim in conferences, interviews, and annual reports…What’s really being discussed in these conferences and reports is transition, not transformation.

On the need for a real food movement:

Linking people working separately on obesity, undernutrition or the climate crisis is one of the big challenges in creating concerted local-to-global action.  No transformative social movement yet exists that addresses malnutrition.  It’s about time.

Indeed, yes.

The United Nations has issued a digital Food Systems Thinking Guide for UN Resident Coordinators and UN Country Teams with tools and information for working collectively towards food system transformation.

It is intended as a working draft.  It provides an easy mechanism for immediate feedback.

You have to do a lot of scrolling.  When you do, you will get to key questions:

• What is a food systems approach and why does it matter?
• What is the state of food systems in my country?
• Who are the actors influencing the foods system?
• What are barriers and entry points to food system transformation?
• How can I integrate foods systems approach into programming?
• How can I communicate and advocate for foods systems transformation?

I took a look at the actors.  This section provides resources for engaging with stakeholders.

I also looked at barriers.  It lists things to consider and provides resources.

And I looked at communication strategies.  This one is much more complete and has useful videos and key messages along with the resources.

I see this as an advocacy toolkit focused on food system transformation.  Happy to have it.  Try it and give the UN some feedback on it to make it even better and more complete.

It’s a slow-news holiday week so I’m going to use it to catch up on reports.  The first:

FAO: The State of Food and Agriculture 2024: Value-Driven Transformation of Agrifood Systems

FAO uses true cost accounting (TCA) to analyze global food systems.

• ➔ By improving on the hidden costs quantified in The State of Food and Agriculture 2023, this report unpacks the health hidden costs associated with unhealthy dietary patterns linked to an increased risk of non-communicable diseases (NCDs).
• ➔ Case studies show how targeted TCA assessments conducted across multiple agrifood systems categories provide more nuanced insights into the requisite agrifood systems transformation and potential actions moving forward.

Here is an example of the kinds of analyses presented here.

And here are the resources:

• Read the full digital report
• Read the In Brief
• Read the interactive story: Beyond the price tag
• Watch the video: State of Food and Agriculture 2024. Value-driven transformation of agrifood systems
• Read the press release: Unhealthy dietary patterns drive $8 trillion in annual hidden costs of global agrifood systems
• Read The State of Food and Agriculture 2023

Read the background papers:

• Navigating the distributional challenges of agrifood systems transformation
• The hidden costs of coffee production in the Eastern African value chains
• A typology for agrifood systems
• Potential of crop diversification to address the hidden costs of major crop value chains in Central Asia
• Refining national true cost accounting for agrifood systems
• Hidden costs of agrifood systems
• How to reduce agrifood systems’ future hidden costs? A multi-country case study

IPES Food (International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems) has a new report,  Food From Somewhere: Building food security and resilience through territorial markets.

The report argues that territorial food systems are better able to promote food security than industrial food systems.  This is because “corporate controlled global food chains offer a flawed recipe for food security, and are full of risks and vulnerabilities:

• the exposure of industrial commodity production to climate shocks;
• the diversion of valuable resources into ultraprocessed foods, livestock feed, and fuel;
• the standardization of diets around wheat, rice, and maize, and the growing reliance on a handful of crops and commodity exporters for global calorie intake;
• the bottlenecks in fragmented and geographically-dispersed global chains;
• the vast energy requirements built into high-tech digitalized supply chains – and
• the dangers of making global food security contingent on ‘just-in-time’ supply chains that do not work all the time.”

The remedy: “we found that territorial markets are the backbone of food systems in many countries and regions, and make critical contributions to food security, equity, and sustainability, while building resilience on multiple fronts.”

By territorial, they mean regional, local, close-to-home markets, with short supply chains.

The report comes with a video introduction.