The EAT–Lancet Commission on Healthy, Sustainable, and Just Food Systems, a key international authority, published its latest report in October 2025. Its conclusions were damning: “More than half of the world’s population struggles to access healthy diets, leading to devastating consequences for public health, social equity, and the environment”.
The following month The Lancet published research specifically examining the role of Ultra-Processed Foods and concluded that they posed a major public health threat, displacing fresh and minimally processed foods, which was “fuelled by powerful global corporations who generate huge profits by prioritising ultra-processed products, supported by extensive marketing and political lobbying to stop effective public health policies to support healthy eating”.
This is a global crisis that has yet to receive the attention Big Oil has garnered. No protestors are breaking into factories that produce ultra-processed food. No one is sticking poison signs on packets of Pringles, which, according to their marketing, “Once you pop, you can’t stop”. We accept Kellogg’s sponsoring breakfast clubs in the UK, encouraging young children to eat ultra-processed cereals, and receiving kudos for it.
Hence, this issue focuses mainly on the economics of the food system and what is needed to develop a system that provides healthy, sustainable food for all.
Stuart Gillespie, author of Food Fight, provides a comprehensive overview, drawing on his 40 years as an international expert and activist against Big Food. Million Belay, a long-time food activist in Africa, discusses the fight for food sovereignty through agroecological farming and the rediscovery of African food heritage. Dil Green and I examine potential new economic approaches to develop alternative, value-based food economies.
Stephanie Walton argues that we need to address the block to change created by stranded assets, while Donatella Gasparro suggests that we have to face up to the real problem, capitalism.
Jack Thompson reveals the hidden history of pollution, profiteering and protest behind Britain’s favourite breakfast cereal, Weetabix. Nick Easen explains how more biodiverse grain strains could create more resilient crops in the face of climate change. Julien Étienne tells the story of the Fens—an engineered landscape that feeds the UK and whose people are facing critical threats from climate change. Tanya Zerbian, Soledad Cuevas, Ana Moragues-Faus and Daniel López-García tell the ups and downs of local food activism in Valencia, Spain.
Zooming out from food, Francesco Vigliarolo explains why prioritising financial interests over human rights has produced our dysfunctional world; Stewart Lansley argues that too much of the UK’s abundant wealth is of the wrong kind; and Jeremy Williams reviews Cory Doctorow’s recent book, ‘Enshittification’, explaining why your experience of the internet has worsened and what to do about it.
Finally our very own Professor Verity Bastion provides some light relief with tales of a food fight in her neck of the woods.
I hope you are having a good break over the festive season.
