Review Articles

Waterlogging threatens global crop production, yet it remains under-represented in agricultural impact assessments and crop models. This Review examines 21 crop models, identifying limitations in how they simulate waterlogging and coupled soil–crop processes. It also proposes pathways to enhance model accuracy for better agricultural adaptation and management.

The European Commission’s Farm to Fork and Biodiversity strategies, considered important steps in the pursuit of healthier and more sustainable food systems, now face political backlash. To understand this process and its impact, this study analyses recent shifts in EU agri-food governance across four dimensions of (post-)exceptionalism: ideas, institutions, interests and policies.

Technological advancements are needed before cultivated meat can supply dietary protein at a competitive cost and with lower environmental impacts than livestock production. This Review explores how techno-economic analyses can guide research towards providing sustainable scaled-up cultivated beef production.

Fisheries and aquaculture production are key to livelihoods, food and nutrition, yet over one-third of global aquatic harvest is lost or wasted. The post-harvest sector, key to reducing these losses, and dominated by women workers, is not well understood. This systematic review synthesizes evidence on equity and equality outcomes of post-harvest practices and technologies that aim to reduce loss and waste in the fisheries sector.

The relevance of history to contemporary food security issues is often overlooked, yet context is key to understand drivers of vulnerability and to design interventions. This Review offers a historical account of eastern African food systems from 1497 to 1840, including maps, documentary sources and archaeological data on foodstuffs, farming and diets.

Multiple stable cell lines will be needed for cultivated meat scale-up and industrial production. This Review explores the potential of myogenic, adipogenic and extracellular matrix-producing adult stem cells and embryonic or inducible pluripotent stem cells for their proliferative and differentiation capacity, necessary for cultivated meat production.

Elevated CO₂, global warming, ozone pollution and drought are major climate-related environmental challenges affecting field crop production. This Review discusses strategies and opportunities for crop production under climate change and air pollution at the plant, field and ecosystem scales.

Irrigation expansion is expected to meet increasing food demand and help agriculture adapt to climate change. This Review article synthesizes the various linkages between irrigation and climate, evaluating their impacts on each other and presenting innovative solutions for sustainable irrigation under climate change.

Wildfires can be a highly disruptive force in agricultural systems, yet their impacts are poorly understood. Looking at the western United States as a case study, this scoping review identifies and analyses the pathways—direct, downwind and downstream—through which wildfires impact agricultural resources, labour, and crop and livestock products.

The phyllosphere is essential for plant health and fitness. This Review examines the relations between phyllosphere microbiota and the host plants and constructs a framework to engineer the phyllosphere microbiome for sustainable crop production.

Computer-aided food engineering (CAFE) drives high-level innovations in food safety and quality. The multiscale structure of foods requires novel modelling paradigms. This Review explores current CAFE modelling frameworks and computational approaches and the challenges to introducing computer-aided engineering in food-manufacturing processes.

Hedonic responses to food odour may be rooted in evolution, associated learning or the physiochemical structure of odorants. Here, vanilla is used to study these mechanisms in an effort to understand why some flavours are universally liked and how that might be advanced in food science.

When plants are under stress, the over-accumulation of reactive oxygen species (ROS) leads to phytotoxicity and growth inhibition. This Review examines the current approaches of applying ROS-scavenging and ROS-triggering nanomaterials to plants to enhance stress resistance and explores their delivery pathways.

Unfed bivalve mariculture could fill the gap in demand for nutritious and sustainable seafood. This Review explores the bivalve value chain, examining how improved production practices and food processing could address consumer requirements for increased food safety and greater availability of appealing bivalve food products.

Vertical farming systems have the potential to form a part of resilient food systems through the production of reliable, high-quality crops in urban landscapes. This Review explores how multi-layer indoor crop cultivation systems currently operate and the conditions needed to upscale and support their integration into mainstream agriculture.

Several frameworks aimed at making the effects of food production and consumption on society explicit have emerged recently. This Review identifies the main ones currently in use and compares them in terms of scope, functional unit, impacts and monetization types—with an outlook to their harmonization.

The continued proliferation of certification schemes aimed at mitigating social and environmental problems in the food sector calls for constant stocktaking of their effects. This Review examines some of the most prominent sustainability standards to discuss the issues of causality, exclusion, compliance and monitoring, excess supply and emerging country markets—ultimately identifying directions for future research.

Crop microbiomes provide plants with beneficial functions including increased nutrient acquisition and stress tolerance, but the current capability of utilizing indigenous crop microbiomes is limited due to low efficiency of separating the targeted functional microbes. A newly proposed framework using single-cell-sorting Raman spectroscopy combined with a synthetic community approach has the potential to design and optimize a ‘beneficial biome’.

Understanding of the effects of elevated CO₂ on crops has improved sufficiently that modelling future climatic effects on agriculture should eliminate ‘no CO₂’ simulations. Further advancement in the estimation of the effects can be realized by studying a wider variety of crop species under a wider range of growing conditions, improving the representation of responses to climate extremes in crop models and simulating additional crop physiological processes related to nutritional quality.

Conceptual frameworks linking food security and agriculture are diverse in their perspectives, assumptions and applications. After reviewing 36 such frameworks, systems modelling conventions are applied to a broadly cited framework to demonstrate the utility of incorporating these tools into food security frameworks for the interdisciplinary food community.