While preparing our Action Sprint on the future of plant-based innovation in the context of a just transition to healthy, sustainable diets in Europe and the US, we collected a few articles and information sources that we’d like to share. It’s not an exhaustive list of essential reading (and it’s in no particular order), but it might be useful.

If you have any suggested reading, please do share links in the comments.

Key concepts and definitions

• UN definition of ‘food security’
• Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights on the right to food: Includes useful definitions and key documents
• What leads to food poverty? Helpful definitions of key concepts, from UK food alliance Sustain
• 21-Day Racial Equity Habit Building Challenge: A process for deepening understanding of, and willingness to confront, racism for twenty-one consecutive days

National and local authority landscape, strategies and initiatives

• UK National Food Strategy: An independent review commissioned by the UK Government to set out a vision for the future of food in England
• Affordability of the UK’s Eatwell Guide: Paper from the UK’s Food Foundation exploring the affordability of the UK’s Eatwell Guide(the national dietary guidelines)
• Food for thought – engage with communities to tackle food poverty: Wirral’s public health team discuss how working with the community was key to the success of a UK local food strategy
• Urban Food Futures 2035: Foresight project to reimagine the future of food environments and build a shared agenda for change
• Scotland Welfare Foods – consultation report: Consultation on meeting needs of children and families in Scotland, incl suggestions for a programme to support families to establish healthy eating habits
• UK’s Ian Byrne MP on the Right to Food and turning Liverpool into a Right to Food city
• Hungry for change, UK Lords report on food poverty and dietary inequality
• The hunger industry: does charity put a Band-Aid on American inequality? The pandemic has raised awareness of the US food insecurity crisis and highlighted the reliance on corporate food philanthropy. Incl useful data/stats about US food poverty, lived experiences, examples of organisations and initiatives.

Impacts of COVID-19

• The Impact of COVID-19 on Household Food Insecurity: Results from the Food Foundation’s 2021 research on the impacts of the COVID pandemic on food insecurity in the UK + children’s concerns around food and COVID in lockdown
• COVID Realities: Participatory online research project during the pandemic with parents and carers living on a low income

Accessibility and affordability

• Accessibility and affordability of healthy foods for all: Blog on Business Fights Poverty outlining some of the key issues and highlighting the work of various key organisations in this space, in particular World Benchmarking Alliance Food and Ag benchmark
• ‘Let’s make affordability part of the organic conversation’ – Affordability and accessibility in organic food: About making organic food more accessible, and why it’s currently often more expensive (because less sustainable options externalise costs such as environmental damage)
• What we’ve learnt about the affordability of food: Affordability of Protein-Rich Foods – Evidence from Zambia: Interesting insights about affordability (although out of geographical scope for this Action Sprint)

Indeces and benchmarks

• The Global Food Security Index: The Economist Intelligence Unit’s ninth Global Food Security Index considers the issues of food affordability, availability, quality and safety, and natural resources and resilience across 113 countries. It shows a deterioration in the global food environment for a second year running, with impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Food and Agriculture Benchmark: A framework for corporate action on food system transformation: Pages 19-22 show the indicators around food accessibility and affordability used by the World Benchmarking Alliance
• Global Access to Nutrition Index 2021 + Methodology: The Index assesses how the world’s largest global food and beverage manufacturers contribute to addressing malnutrition in all its forms: overweight and obesity, undernutrition, and micronutrient deficiency. Category C focuses on Accessibility: Delivering affordable, accessible products. Page 51: Methodology for assessing corporate approaches to affordability.

Philanthropy and innovation funding

• The Food Systems Game Changers Lab: A global program on the future of food by EAT, IDEO, Thought For Food, The Rockefeller Foundation and Forum For the Future

• Rockefeller Foundation’s work on food in the US: Includes Reset the Table report on impacts of COVID-19 on US food system
• Innovate UK give £47,000 to“food poverty map” project: A team at the University of Nottingham are working with OLIO to create a“food poverty map” via machine learning that could help local authorities target their food support

Ingredients, products and trends

• 17 cheap and healthy sources of protein
• Cheap Eats: Cookbook Shows How To Eat Well On A Food Stamp Budget: About Leanne Brown’s cookbook of recipes anyone can cook on a budget of $4 a day
• Expanding the possibilities of plant-based product development: About novel ingredients discussed during a series of panels at the virtual Future Food-Tech summit early 2021
• Prepare for the split in plant-based demand: The plant-based protein market is set to diverge for two sets of consumers: those demanding products that mimic meat, and those that want vegetables to be the‘heroes’ of their plates, panellists told FoodNavigator during a recent webinar focusing on plant-based protein trends
• Top eight alternative protein trends to watch in 2021: Industry and product innovation trends in the alternative protein sector

Our Action Sprint brought valuable and cutting-edge insights from actors across the food system, which have been fed into the UN Food System dialogues. To read the full dialogue report, click here.