Humanity can farm more food from the seas to help feed the planet while shrinking mariculture’s negative impacts on biodiversity, according to new research led by the University of Michigan.
Research led by the University of Michigan shows that communities of color in Texas face pronounced risks of E. coli exposure in nearby waters after intense rain.
Community program and policy interventions aimed at reducing screen time are less successful in neighborhoods that lack green space
To combat climate change, the world needs to pivot away from fossil fuels. But building battery electric vehicles and infrastructure for renewable energy will require enormous amounts of minerals and resources.
The Mellon Foundation has awarded nearly $4 million in a first-of-its kind grant to bolster the University of Michigan’s leading work in environmental justice.
Built on the expertise and experiences of urban agriculturalists, along with research from the University of Michigan, a new policy brief urges Congress to fully fund the Office of Urban Agriculture.
The Maasai Mara National Reserve was established to protect wildlife, yet it has seen populations shrink among its large, iconic herbivores, including zebras, impalas and elephants, over the last few decades.
A new trailer is an exciting step forward in making fresh, local produce more accessible to the campus community.
Maples is an Anishinaabe seed keeper, educator, and community organizer who has dedicated over a decade of work to Indigenous food sovereignty and justice.
Nanoparticles delivered intravenously in mice can block the allergic reactions to red meat caused by the bite of the lone star tick, new research led by U-M shows. The condition, called alpha-gal syndrome, is on the rise in humans as climate change and other factors have led the ticks to expand their habitat.
Each year, hundreds of thousands of Michigan parents worry whether they can afford to feed their children. Increased food prices, the state’s housing crisis, and the end of COVID-era financial support have all led to more Michigan families experiencing food insecurity today than before the pandemic.
Urban agriculture can support cities’ wider goals and provide residents with self-grown, nutritious food if more governments start supporting – instead of criminalizing – the practice, Taubman College faculty member Lesli Hoey argues in a new book.
Faced with an ecological crisis, public health emergencies and socioeconomic inequities, agroecology emerges as a transdisciplinary beacon of hope.
Currently the director of the Office of Energy Justice and Equity and the secretarial adviser on equity at the U.S. Department of Energy, and formerly the department’s chief diversity officer, Baker will advance sustainability education and research across U-M schools and colleges.
About a third of the food produced globally each year goes to waste, while approximately 800 million people suffer from hunger, according to the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization.
A new study published online April 4 in the journal Science finds that agricultural diversification comes with significant benefits, and very few negative effects.
"For more than four decades, Bunyan taught and mentored SEAS students, modeling for them how to be effective advocates for equity and justice in communities that face environmental racism. Thanks to Bunyan’s tireless passion for creating change, his legacy as an environmental justice pioneer will live on in future generations of advocates.”
U-M is marking late March and all of April with a series of events focused on sustainability and climate action, continuing a tradition that began with the first “Teach-In on the Environment” in 1970—which grew into what is now known as Earth Day.
Mushrooms come with a seemingly endless list of things that make them unique, including some that glow in the dark, some that are poisonous, and others that have been living for thousands of years. In the natural world, they are known as efficient decomposers and fast growers that play an integral role in maintaining and restoring the ecosystem.
Rackham Ph.D. candidate Etienne Herrick-Sutton works with Great Lakes region farmers to identify strategies for improving the environmental and economic outcomes of cover cropping.
Despite the possibility of climate-smart agriculture improving food security, most CSA practices and technologies are not widely adopted in South Asia.
Rice exported to Haiti—mostly from the United States—contains unhealthy levels of arsenic and cadmium, which can increase the risk of various cancers, heart disease, diabetes and other illnesses, new research shows.
Spearheaded by SEAS PhD candidate Malu Castro, whose family is from Moloka‘i, the work of the first project supports one of the largest Land Back efforts in the modern era of the movement, and the second contributes to fostering and maintaining the longstanding tradition of subsistence agricultural production and other efforts to promote food sovereignty on the island.
Alexa White studies sustainable agriculture in connection with a broader focus on environmental justice. What sustainable agriculture means to people from different parts of the world—and from different socioeconomic strata—is the focus of her dissertation work as a Ph.D. candidate in ecology and evolutionary biology. What environmental justice means to her is, “the right and autonomy for individuals to have access to fresh food, water, and basic human resources without being disenfranchised or oppressed.”
A new U-M-led international study finds that fruits and vegetables grown in urban farms and gardens have a carbon footprint that is, on average, six times greater than conventionally grown produce.
Autonomous and electric vehicles can be a positive force for people and the planet, but widespread gains require government incentives and investment to ensure access for users across the economic spectrum.
"We all know that food is a basic need, a basic right. How do we make refugees feel welcome? My solution was to have a refugee garden.”
Each peer-reviewed factsheet presents data on patterns of use, life cycle impacts, and sustainable solutions. Updated annually by a current SEAS graduate student, the collection is a free resource to inform journalists, policymakers, business professionals, students, teachers and the public.
Agriculture can both help and hinder: It can act as an incubator of novel animal-borne microbes, facilitating their evolution into human-ready pathogens, or it can form barriers that help block their spread.
A new University of Michigan-led study finds that farmers in India have adapted to warming temperatures by intensifying the withdrawal of groundwater used for irrigation. If the trend continues, the rate of groundwater loss could triple by 2080, further threatening India’s food and water security.
Producing palm oil has caused deforestation and biodiversity loss across Southeast Asia and elsewhere, including Central America. Efforts to curtail the damage have largely focused on voluntary environmental certification programs that label qualifying palm-oil sources as “sustainable.”
"Join the conversations already happening rather than remake the wheel. Climate anxiety is very real, and research shows individual actions don’t help reduce that, but collective action—joining groups, clubs, green teams, nonprofit organizations, local watershed coalitions—actually does reduce climate anxiety and eco grief."
"There’s a huge need for people who understand the natural environment and want to work in the urban setting. It’s a surprising gap where best and promising practices from natural resource management don’t make it into the urban planning and urban design space."
"We often say you don’t know where you’re going unless you know where you came from. Studying our history and being aware of all of the deep nuances of Black ag history is so important for what we’re doing today."
“I just thought it was an interesting story that this red alga looks so much like an animal, namely, a coral. It had been unnoticed as such, and then it turned out to have some distinctive features.”
This year’s theme was “Global Change and Its Consequences for Green Life,” and focused on the Direct and indirect impacts of environmental change on green life survival, reproduction, and distribution, how green life can buffer the impact of global change, evolutionary responses of green life to environmental change/stress, green life functional traits and their environmental correlates, and agroecology.
A U-M team, along with researchers and staff from Eastern Michigan University, Duke University and cleantech company 374Water, received $200,000 to fund research around converting lawn, garden and food waste from U-M’s Matthaei Botanical Gardens into valuable products, as well as heat and energy for the gardens’ facilities.
U-M ecologists Ivette Perfecto and John Vandermeer examine competition among the ant community at a Puerto Rican coffee farm and the maintenance of species diversity there.
Instances of injustice lie everywhere—from workers’ rights violations to pollution that disproportionately harms low-income communities of color. The Erb Institute recently convened the workshop “Building Connections for Business, Sustainability & Justice Research,” bringing together scholars, corporate leaders and advocates to explore how research can inform solutions to pressing environmental, social and racial justice challenges.
The Dow Sustainability Fellows Program, administered by the Graham Sustainability Institute, will award over $800,000 in tuition and project funding in 2023. The funds will support more than 40 outstanding graduate students from ten University of Michigan (U-M) schools, colleges, and units, including two large student projects funded by Dow Distinguished Awards.
In the effort to reduce plastic waste in the restaurant industry—single-use takeout containers, specifically—U-M researchers compared the lifetime environmental impacts of single-use and reusable food containers. Their findings support the idea that the number of times a reusable takeout container gets used is a key factor impacting its sustainability performance.
When what you harvest is trash, your crops are in season year-round and they yield overwhelming surplus. In the case of Brooklyn-based artist Robin Frohardt, her haul of single-use plastics, organically harvested from streets and garbage dumps, are artfully repurposed to create and fill an entire 6,000-square-foot supermarket.
Grown from an idea cultivated by U-M student Phimmasone Kym Owens, a collaboration between Jewish Family Services of Washtenaw County (JFS) and Matthaei Botanical Gardens and Nichols Arboretum (MBGNA) has given rise to an area that has been dubbed by its users as “The Freedom Garden” – a space where refugee clients can grow their own food through community gardening.
"There has been a lot of working trying to understand the role of urban gardens and farms in cities. And the general conclusion is that it can provide a lot of social, economic and environmental benefits. Urban agriculture is this sort of unique land use that is extremely customizable to the needs of the community. "
The Transformative Food Systems (TFS) Fellowship was created to attract student leaders who reflect the communities that are most affected by the interrelated environmental, health and economic food systems crises. The two-year program provides selected fellows with the learning and training needed to enable them to transform food systems to be equitable, healthy, and ecologically sound.
Efforts to promote the future health of both wild bees and managed honeybee colonies need to consider specific habitat needs, such as the density of wildflowers. At the same time, improving other habitat measures—such as the amount of natural habitat surrounding croplands—may increase bee diversity while having mixed effects on overall bee health.
Efforts to promote the future health of both wild bees and managed honeybee colonies need to consider specific habitat needs, such as the density of wildflowers. At the same time, improving other habitat measures—such as the amount of natural habitat surrounding croplands—may increase bee diversity while having mixed effects on overall bee health.
U-M Professor Ivette Perfecto recently highlighted the intersection of biodiversity conservation with agriculture on coffee farms. She stated that “about 40% of the Earth’s terrestrial surface is an agricultural system.” While many people may think that agriculture is always harmful to biodiversity, Perfecto says that many agricultural systems, such as the coffee agroforestry systems, can be diverse and “contribute significantly to the conservation of biodiversity.”
When an emergency causes a disruption in access to clean water, it seems reasonable to respond by providing the public with bottled water. In the short term, this can provide a safe supply of water while the problems get sorted out. But what if the emergency has lasted eight years, and counting, as it has in Flint, Michigan?
Fish excretions. Yes, that’s fish pee. Could it improve food security in the Caribbean? Allgeier thinks so, and it might even help slow global warming.
Communities that are engaged in cleaning, mowing and repurposing vacant spaces are likely to experience greater reductions in violence and crime than neighborhoods that do not participate in these activities, according to new research led by the University of Michigan.
Did you know that the average North American household uses roughly 240 gallons of water daily? Or that the Department of Energy estimates that 75% of U.S. energy will come from fossil fuels in 2050, which is widely inconsistent with IPCC carbon reduction goals? Did you know that just 16¢ of every dollar spent on food in 2020 went back to the farm, whereas, in 1975, it was 40¢?
Reames received the award in recognition of his widely influential research into the intersections of affordability, access to clean energy resources and related disparities across race, class and place, which has been the cornerstone of discussions about equity among policy makers at all levels of government.
U-M and Ford Motor Co. researchers modeled emissions for a single 36-item grocery basket transported to the customer via dozens of traditional and e-commerce pathways. Of the various scenarios analyzed by the researchers, in-store shopping by a customer driving an internal-combustion-engine pickup truck produced the most emissions (expressed as kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalents).
U-M researchers are partnering with the Michigan Farm Bureau to understand the unique challenges rural families face when accessing nutritious meals through food assistance. Often, these programs are designed without the user perspective in mind and are implemented in ways that many families do not find accessible or respectful.
The Michigan Farmworker Project (MFP) is a community-based participatory research initiative aimed at improving the social and environmental health of Michigan’s farmworker population, who play a critical role in the state’s food supply chain. In May 2020, the researchers shared first-of-its-kind findings that provided evidence-based approaches to better protecting Michigan’s farmworkers from COVID-19 while providing essential work during the pandemic.
Three tenure track faculty positions will be hired, one each in the Ford School, the School for Environment and Sustainability (SEAS), and the School of Public Health (SPH), to examine the connections among racism and racial violence, environmental injustice and racialized health disparities to achieve better knowledge of the way policies and actions exacerbate or ameliorate unequal burdens of harm, according to the University’s Anti-Racism Hiring Initiative.
A wide-scale look at Detroit’s urban gardens finds that while they don’t seem to foreshadow gentrification in the city, there are some unsettling trends about where they’re located and the sociodemographics in those areas.
Trish Fisher's (MPP/MPH ‘23) work examines agricultural methane governance in the U.S. and Canada—two of the world’s largest producers, consumers, and exporters of livestock and animal source food products. “Recent research has demonstrated that even if global combustion of fossil fuels were to cease immediately, emissions from the global food system alone would exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming and threaten the preclusion of 2 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100,” she said.
In support of ongoing sustainability efforts across U-M, this year the Excellence in Sustainability Honors Cord Program offers special graduation cords for those who have excelled in areas of sustainability. “Most of the fibers in the world have polyester or nylon in them which are fossil fuel-derived materials. We really wanted to steer clear of anything that had any sort of deep fossil fuel footprint or was manufactured overseas," said Stamps School of Art & Design professor Joseph Trumpey.
Taubman College Associate Professor of Urban and Regional Planning Lesli Hoey is leading a team of U-M faculty awarded a competitive grant from the Gilbert Whitaker Fund for the Improvement of Teaching to pilot a new Transformative Food Systems (TFS) Seminar. The interdisciplinary team seeks to fill a key gap in U-M’s sustainable food systems curriculum through a new cross-unit course.
Despite Detroit’s reputation as a mecca for urban agriculture, a new analysis of the city’s Lower Eastside, which covers 15 square miles, found that community and private gardens occupy less than 1% of the vacant land. Even so, gardens there play an important role in reducing neighborhood blight and have the potential to provide other significant benefits to residents in the future.
More than 20% of older adults in the United States will experience food insufficiency at some point in their 60s and 70s, according to a U-M study.
Malik Yakini is a co-founder and executive director of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, which aims to combat food insecurity and cultivate food sovereignty in Detroit’s Black community. The organization has operated the city’s largest urban farm, D-Town, in Rouge Park for more than 20 years and is working to launch the Detroit People’s Food Co-op.
To Paul Draus, a trash-filled city alleyway is an opportunity, a river abused by industrial waste has potential and people battling addiction have promise. Detroit has plenty of all three, and Draus has joined arms with people trying to transform those seemingly undesirable qualities into something beneficial and beautiful.
The Food Literacy for All series is a community-academic partnership course that invites guest speakers each week to address “challenges and opportunities of diverse food systems.” Recent speaker Dr. Priya Fielding-Singh, a sociologist and assistant professor at the University of Utah, researches the causes and consequences of health disparities in the US, with a focus on gender and family.
When Jair Bolsonaro, a right-wing populist, was elected as Brazil’s president in 2018, people began wondering about the consequences of that election for the environment, food systems, and trade, among many other social and ecological issues.
Jacob Allgeier, assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, studies how nutrients and energy cycle through tropical ecosystems in order to better manage fisheries. The artificial reefs he’s building are an inexpensive, effective way to sustainably improve fisheries’ productivity.
Winter visits to the conservatory at Matthaei Botanical Gardens are a treat for the senses: warm temperatures, lush greenery, and plants in bloom or in fruit. A visitor favorite is one of the banana tree plants, which just finished a fruiting cycle. Despite its height, it’s not a true tree after all.
How do various foods and media shape who we are and think we can be, how we want to feel, and what we hope to look like? Are they good for us, or not?
For Frank Turchan, executive chef at M Dining, using local produce is a way to support sustainability, but it’s also just good food. Turchan works with a number of farmers and producers both locally and from across the state. These include more than 20 companies that sell food products, such as Zingerman’s; Prairie Farms, a Midwest dairy cooperative; and Detroit’s Better Made Chips, McClure Pickle, Quality Meats & Culinary Specialties and LaGrasso Brothers, which grows lettuce and sources produce from other local farmers.
Millions of workers in coastal Africa—most of them women—spend their days preserving fish by smoking them in rudimentary, wood-fired mud ovens. U-M researchers and their colleagues looked at the air pollutant exposures and health symptoms experienced by fish smokers in two coastal cities in the West African nation of Ghana.
By pioneering new methods in life cycle analysis, design, and optimization, researchers have made real impacts on the future of alternative vehicle technology, renewable energy systems, buildings and infrastructure, information technology, food and agricultural systems, and packaging alternatives.
Cattle are supremely efficient at digesting tough materials, and a proposed energy-production system based, in part, on cow stomachs could generate 40% more power from municipal waste streams, at a 20% reduced cost—and provide a viable alternative to sending waste to landfills.
Producing the fertilizer that helps feed Earth’s 7.8 billion people comes with an environmental cost—one that U-M engineers are hoping to lessen with a new strategy that favors sunlight over fossil fuels. The National Science Foundation has awarded U-M researchers $2 million to study the effectiveness of a new ammonia production process aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
A U-M study evaluated more than 5,800 foods, ranking them by their nutritional disease burden to humans and their impact on the environment. It found that substituting 10% of daily caloric intake from beef and processed meats for a mix of fruits, vegetables, nuts, legumes and select seafood could reduce your dietary carbon footprint by one-third and allow people to gain 48 minutes of healthy minutes per day.
U-M will achieve carbon neutrality across all greenhouse gas emission scopes, committing to geothermal heating and cooling projects, electric buses, the creation of a revolving fund for energy-efficiency projects and the appointment of a new executive-level leader, reporting to the president, focusing on carbon neutrality-related efforts.
The "Green Revolution" in seed and fertilizer technology that bolstered food production and economic well-being in Asian and Latin American countries which began 50 years ago bypassed sub-Saharan African nations. In 2006, a number of those countries embarked on an ambitious plan to invest billions of dollars into their own green revolution.
What is the carbon footprint for all of the food the University of Michigan consumes? And how can that footprint be reduced? That was one of the many study areas the President’s Commission on Carbon Neutrality addressed in its final report.
A lot of attention has been paid in recent years to the carbon footprint of the foods we eat, with much of the focus on the outsize contribution of meat production and especially beef. But much less is known about the implications of individual U.S. dietary choices on other environmental concerns, such as water scarcity.
To LSA Collegiate Fellow and anthropologist Alyssa Paredes, the banana narrative is a parable for commerce, environmental degradation, and disparity. By uncovering the complex paradoxes and disconnects in the banana industry, Paredes reveals how industrialized food production shapes the fate of many rural regions in our world.
Food systems initiatives regularly use stories as a communication tool to showcase and gain attention for their work. Yet few of these efforts use systematic ways to collect and analyze stories.
The President’s Commission on Carbon Neutrality at the University of Michigan has submitted its final report, which contains recommendations to help the university achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions. The report includes 50 recommendations that U-M could take to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions across the Ann Arbor, Dearborn and Flint campuses.
The Carbon Neutrality Acceleration Program at U-M’s Graham Sustainability Institute has awarded research grants to seven projects aimed at reducing net carbon emissions. The first round of funding was awarded to projects that investigate groundbreaking energy-storage and carbon-capture technologies, innovative ways to reduce carbon emissions in agriculture, and new options for lowering the carbon footprint of U-M student diets.
A study published by U-M researchers quantifies the air pollution that impacts Latinx communities in California due to beef production. The study focuses on Costco's beef supply chain in California and explores the environmental impacts of air pollution resulting from beef production in the San Joaquin Valley, a region that has some of the worst air quality in the United States.
Zahir Janmohamed, co-founder of the James Beard nominated podcast Racist Sandwich, discusses why he thinks the subjects of race, gender, class cannot be separated from discussions about food; and offers advice and lessons learned from his successes and failures to get traditional media to center their stories around non-white, non-male voices.
We’ve all heard the axiom: “Give a man a fish, and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he will eat for a lifetime.” That’s all well and good, says Alex Bryan, BA ’07. “But it’s a lot easier to learn to fish if you’re not really hungry at the time.”
Chiapas, the southernmost state in Mexico, is a land of lush rainforests, pine-clad mountains, turquoise waterfalls, and ancient Mayan temples. Milpa (polycultures of corn, beans, squash, edible volunteers) have been grown in the highly fertile region for thousands of years and, together with home gardens, provide the foundation for diverse, healthy, and delicious traditional diets.
More than 100,000 restaurants have closed permanently or for the long term as a result of COVID-19, according to a September survey by the National Restaurant Association. Despite that grim statistic, Arlin Wasserman, founder and partner of Changing Tastes, is optimistic that the industry will recover from the pandemic—just as it did with prior challenges, including the economic downturns of 2001 and 2007.
Ajay Varadharajan (MS/MSE ’11) is the creator of GreenSwapp, the “first carbon-neutral grocery store app” that tracks the carbon footprint of the food items you buy, suggests lower-impact products that can reduce your cart’s footprint, and offsets the rest of it to make them carbon-neutral.
The health of our global food systems hangs in the balance of a changing climate. At the same time, these food networks also release a significant amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, exacerbating our climate crisis. Current climate trends place unprecedented pressures on global food systems.
“The reason your neighborhood and your food system are connected is that they are your network. Your neighborhood is also where you can see investment and see those investments in your lawn, your business, your neighborhood, returned, because people stay.”
Typically, U-M dining halls offer reusable ware for on-site dining. But this semester, all meals will be served in takeout containers, and most of those containers will be fully compostable. These measures aim to reduce dining density while advancing the university’s commitment to composting
My research program mostly centers around food insecurity. For the past three to four years, I have been focused on student food insecurity because it has become such an emergent issue around college students’ health and wellbeing.
The pandemic of 2020 created challenging conditions which some say could result in one of the most significant world transformations since the world wars of the 20th century. The problem of food acquisition, the central problem of existence from Homo erectus to us, will almost certainly be changed as our species emerges from the most dire emergency in a century.
Even before the coronavirus pandemic wreaked havoc with the nation’s food supply and economy, one in seven adults between the ages of 50 and 80 already had trouble getting enough food because of cost or other issues, a new poll finds. The percentage who said they’d experienced food insecurity in the past year was even higher among those in their pre-Medicare years, and those who are African American or Latino.
Replacing half of all animal-based foods in the U.S. diet with plant-based alternatives could reduce climate-altering greenhouse gas emissions 1.6 billion metric tons by 2030, according to a new study by researchers at U-M and Tulane University.
Ravi Anupindi, a Ross School of Business professor and founding faculty director of the Center for Value Chain Innovation, discusses the many challenges—and some opportunities—for the players in the food supply chain as it deals with the fallout from COVID-19.
Children whose families have access to food assistance get more education, live longer and are less likely to rely on public assistance or be incarcerated as they grow up, according to a U-M-led study.
Some of our most cherished sustainable farming practices — from organic agriculture to the farm cooperative and the CSA — have roots in African wisdom. Yet, discrimination and violence against African-American farmers has led to our decline from 14 percent of all growers in 1920 to less than 2 percent today, with a corresponding loss of over 14 million acres of land.
Parents who experience food insecurity might think they’re protecting their children from their family’s food situation by eating less or different foods so their children can be spared. But a new study led by U-M researchers shows that children know more about food insecurity—the state of being without reliable access to a sufficient quantity of affordable, nutritious food—than their parents give them credit for.
Part of the U-M President’s Commission on Carbon Neutrality, an analysis team of students and faculty is evaluating U-M’s food system, with an eye toward quantifying and reducing greenhouse gas emissions linked to food production, procurement and waste.
Detroit growers Jerry Hebron, Ashley Atkinson and Naim Edwards and environmental justice advocate Michelle Martinez discuss how climate change directly impacts urban agriculture and environmental issues in Detroit.
From glossy print magazines to Instagram stories, media influences how people grow, eat, and consume food. Ten years ago, social media turned every aspect of the gilded culinary world on its head. Today, a new breed of content makers, critics, and writers are amplifying the goodness across every corner of the US.
Sean Sherman, Oglala Lakota from the Pine Ridge reservation and founder of The Sioux Chef, is committed to revitalizing Native American cuisine. Through his research, Sherman has mapped out the foundations of indigenous food systems through an indigenous perspective.
Pakou Hang, co-founder of the Minnesota-based Hmong American Farmers Association, speaks about the policies and practices that can feed a robust ecosystem and support the resilience of farmers of color.
Jessica Holmes presents an overview of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and the potential impact of recent proposals on food insecure families, noting the impact of poverty on one’s overall health and life expectancy.
While most of the Puerto Rican coffee farms did lose a great deal of shade cover—an average of 37.5% canopy loss—there was “no relationship” between the amount of shade on a farm and damage to its coffee plants, U-M researchers report in a recent study.
U-M marine ecologist Jacob Allgeier uses artificial reefs, mathematical modeling and community-based conservation programs to understand how an unlikely but renewable source of fertilizer—fish excretion—can be used to stimulate fish production and improve food security in tropical ecosystems.
For sustainability initiatives in food retail, do the largest hurdles lie in the supply chain, or within the walls of corporate headquarters? As sustainability becomes a bigger priority for food producers and retailers, more and more companies are forming sustainability teams to push toward a new food economy through supply chain transformation.
When thinking about ways to end global hunger, many scholars focus too narrowly on increasing crop yields while overlooking other critical aspects of the food system. That’s one conclusion from a U-M-led research team that reviewed recent scholarly papers discussing the United Nations goal of ending hunger and malnutrition worldwide by 2030. The authors are members of U-M’s Sustainable Food Systems Initiative.
Much like in the rest of the country, food systems in Buffalo, NY have been overlooked in local government planning and policy. Yet, the food system has played a key role in the rustbelt city’s history and renaissance. This talk explores the ways in which ordinary, incremental, and collective action by community actors — or rustbelt radicalism — has spurred food systems policy transformation in the city of Buffalo, NY.
Author and activist Anna Lappé traces the many ripples of a way of farming that fights against nature and how communities around the country and the world are tapping natural wisdom to build abundant, just, diverse food systems and push back against corporate control.
A new study examining the carbon footprint of what more than 16,000 Americans eat in a day has good news for environmentally conscious consumers: diets that are more climate-friendly are also healthier. The study, conducted by researchers at U-M and Tulane University, is the first to compare the climate impact and nutritional value of U.S. diets using real-world data about what Americans say they are eating.
A new report released by the U-M Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning and the Washtenaw County organization Food Gatherers demonstrates the local impact of work requirements for those receiving food assistance from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP.
The current global food system is inadequate to meet the needs of the current world population without compromising future wellbeing. Intensified production systems lead to undernutrition in some regions coupled with epidemics of obesity in others while compromising their underlying ecological foundations, such as creating areas of ocean hypoxia.
Human food systems are a key contributor to climate change and other environmental concerns. While the environmental impacts of diets have been evaluated at the aggregate level, few studies, and none for the US, have focused on individual self-selected diets. Such work is essential for estimating a distribution of impacts, which, in turn, is key to recommending policies for driving consumer demand towards lower environmental impacts.