resources
Some other go-to-sources of information on climate, food and nutrition policy, science and culture including websites, reports, books, twitter feeds etc.
copyright: Paul Vincent
Food politics + Culture
Marion Nestle’s blog with more of a U.S.-centric take on food politics. She also has a book of the same name.
Civil Eats is a daily news source on the politics of the American food system. Founded by Naomi Starkman, they publish stories that “shift the conversation around sustainable agriculture in an effort to build economically and socially just communities.”
Ambrook Research is a “data-driven storytelling for modern agriculture” site that curates fantastic articles from around the world with a focus on U.S. issues.
NPR’s The Salt is a great mainstream news resource on all things food but has plenty of pieces on food politics.
This is just too cool. The site “mammamiaaaa” is dedicated to curating social food projects through recipes and communities of practice. You may start drooling as you explore the site. Consider yourself warned…
Taste is a great sight for food lovers. It is not just about cooking but has great articles on the origins of foods, stories of food culture, and recipes, of course.
Eater is fantastic for finding restaurants where you live or a city you are traveling to. It is often my go-to source if I need information on new restaurants.
Some other in-depth pages or special sections of media outlets include Eater longform, BBC food, Mother Jones’s food section, Devex’s future of food systems, and FT’s sustainable food futures.
Medium has a special selection of writing on dining out.
And last, The Counter was a fantastic outfit reporting on the “facts and frictions of the American food system.” They lost their funding and are now defunct, but they have kept their stories up online. Let’s hope they stay that way.
nutrition + Diets
The Global Nutrition Report is an annual report on the global state of nutrition and progress in tackling malnutrition.
The UNSCN website (United Nations Standing Committee on Nutrition) is a useful resource for nutrition news from the UN agencies working on nutrition. Lots of resources on this site as well.
The Guardian News, based out of the UK, has a “malnutrition” page as part of their global development series that presents news, comment, and features on malnutrition, focusing on the developing world. There are only about 1 or 2 posts on this a month.
Kelly Brownell at Duke’s World Food Policy Center started a great podcast, “The Leading Voices in Food.” He interviews thought leaders and covers various nutrition and food systems topics. Good stuff.
Another good podcast is Climavores, started by WaPo food writers Tamar Haspel and Michael Grunwald, about eating in a changing climate.
The podcast Maintenance Phase is rocking my world - debunking nutrition science one diet book at a time.
Solving India’s malnutrition is the mother of all mothers. POSHAN, an initiative funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to analyze existing nutrition programs and mobilize a base for action in India, is trying to do just that. Led by the amazing Purnima Menon, the site has a rich source of information on nutrition in South Asia.
As much as we wish undernutrition was no longer a global problem, unfortunately, it is. The State of Acute Malnutrition site is rich in acute malnutrition data, which tracks over 20 indicators, including prevalence, incidence, and coverage. It also has lots of resources and program highlights. It is supported by No Wasted Lives.
Task Force on Fiscal Policy for Health examines excise tax policy for health, including barriers to implementation, and makes recommendations on how countries can best leverage fiscal policies to yield improved health outcomes for their citizens with the added benefit of bringing in additional revenue. Good stuff, including case studies on sugar taxes.
Nutrition Connect is an initiative of the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN). Nutrition Connect’s purpose is to “mobilize knowledge, share experiences, and stimulate dialogue on public-private engagements (PPE) for nutrition.”
Taylor Francis has put a ton of resources that address zero hunger and malnutrition on something called SDG online. Here is the library for SDG2 - over 1,000 books, chapters, and articles at your disposal!
The NOURISHING database systematically lists implemented policies to promote healthy diets & reduce obesity. Good stuff here.
food systems + AGRICULTURE + ENVIRONMENT + CLIMATE
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s State of Food Insecurity report, also known as “SOFI.” An annual report examines the progress toward ending hunger, food insecurity, and malnutrition. It always has a theme.
The Johns Hopkins Global Food Policy and Ethics Project has a great weekly roundup on all things food. Sign up to get the newsletter in your inbox here. Click on "Global Food Ethics Project News Roundup. Biased here…
Table is a food dialogue started by the University of Oxford, the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, and Wageningen University and Research. Table explores the evidence and values that underpin global food system debates. It synthesizes and communicates research at the intersection of food, climate, and broader sustainability issues. Really good stuff that is updated regularly.
Table also has something called “Foodsource.” It is an open and expanding resource for information on sustainable food systems. Foodsource's purpose is to build the foundations for this understanding and for change towards more sustainable food systems by increasing food systems literacy. They have a comprehensive book in the form of chapters, building blocks, images, and videos on food systems. Really good stuff here.
Luigi Guarino and Jeremy Cherfas (of Eat This Podcast) have been going at this Agrobiodiverse blog dedicated to agriculture biodiversity for a long time. I think I can rightly say these guys know their stuff. They are also critical of what comes out in food security and nutrition, and usually…they are right.
Ecoagriculture Partners, started by Sara Scherr, has great blog posts and other info. The site focuses more on ecosystem services and landscape studies.
The EAT Forum has a couple of podcasts are worth listening to. One is the Food Can Fix It podcast, which “talks to the leaders on the frontlines of the food revolution.” The other is led by the EAT team called Let’s Rethink Food, which discusses findings from the EAT-Lancet Commission report.
Deep in the World Resource Institute’s website, they have space dedicated to all things food. They focus mainly on sustainability issues. They also have a great blog c“Insights,” dedicated to development and sustainability issues. Good stuff.
The UK’s Global Food Security program focuses on food-related research. Their website is rich in content.
The Southern Africa Food Lab is a great site rich in content on Southern African food systems, including excellent blogs and videos.
The Biodiversity for Food and Nutrition — B4FN for short — has many resources, case studies, e-learning materials, and a food composition database with 185 indigenous species. Good stuff is coming out of Bioversity, and my buds, Danny and Teresa, with colleagues from around the world.
The Lexicon is a great site that explores the storytelling of all things food. Beautifully done.
Food + Planet is a great resource for health professionals who want to accelerate the transition toward a healthy and sustainable food system. They have many good resources on sustainable diets and will issue sustainability guidance for RDNs, health experts, industry, and consumers.
Columbia University’s State of the Planet. I am biased here as a Columbia employee, but the research on climate and earth sciences is truly fantastic and cutting-edge.
The Food Systems Dashboard was produced by Johns Hopkins University and GAIN with other partners, including FAO, University of Michigan, Michigan State, and Ag2Nut colleagues. It has an insane number of indicators that characterize food systems around the world. I am biased here…
The Food Security Portal is an open-access data hub that brings international, regional, and country-level data, news, and research to monitor food security. It is hosted by IFPRI. A bit unwieldy, but has a ton of information if you poke around.
EarthStat is a series of geographic data sets that help solve the grand challenge of feeding a growing global population while reducing agriculture’s impact on the environment. it is a collaboration between the Global Landscapes Initiative at the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment and the Land Use and Global Environment lab at the University of British Columbia.
The Global Food Fortification Data Exchange has some great content on all things food fortification, including legislation status, standards, population coverage, etc. You can download dashboards or their full data set.
The International Dietary Data Expansion Project, also known as INDDEX, is a fantastic resource for all indicators of dietary data and food consumption. A great resource developed by Jennifer Coates at Tufts University.
The Global Diet Quality Project site gives us dietary data on the general adult population across countries worldwide and provides the tools for valid and feasible diet quality monitoring within countries. The project enables the collection of consistent, comparable dietary data across countries for the first time. Beautiful.
Sustainable Agriculture Matrix is a site that quantifies national performance indicators in agriculture and investigates the trade-offs and synergies based on historical data for most countries of the world. The results reveal priority areas for improvement by each country and show that the trade-offs and synergies among indicators often differ.
Innovative Food Systems Solution (IFSS) portal provides food system solutions, funding, resources, and tools that ensure sustainable and resilient food systems provide affordable, safe, and nutritious diets for the growing global population on a healthy planet. Wow! That’s a lot.
World Wildlife Fund’s Planet Based Diet tool allows you to see what changes you can make to your diet to help reduce the impacts on the environment in your country. Pretty cool stuff.
The Global Nutrition and Health Atlas (GNHA) is a new online platform that consolidates and provides free access to global nutrition and health data for over 190 countries. It was developed by the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University and collaborated with Nestlé (yikes…). The data is divided into six key dimensions: demographics, dietary intakes, nutritional status, health status, health economics, and food sustainability.
Hand-in-Hand is an evidence-based, country-led, and country-owned initiative of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) to accelerate the agricultural transformation and sustainable rural development. It assembles a million geospatial layers and thousands of statistics series with 4,000 metadata records from soil, land, water, climate, fisheries, livestock, crops, forestry, trade, etc.
Global Hunger Index is a tool designed to comprehensively measure and track hunger at global, regional, and national levels.
HANCI is an index that ranks governments on their political commitment to tackling hunger and undernutrition. It sadly doesn’t seem to have any new data in the last five years. Bummer!
ATNI is the Access to Nutrition Index that ranks food companies and how they are doing providing nutritious foods. Drumroll, please…
Biofortification Priority Index ranks 128 low- and middle-income countries according to their impact potential for investment in each of the 13 biofortified staple food crops.