The UK food system is a driver of the public health crisis of non-communicable disease, is linked to the cost-of-living crisis, and contributes to climate change, biodiversity loss and soil degradation. The economy relies strongly on the health of its people and food businesses, while also impacting the livelihoods of food system actors. However, action towards more resilient, equitable and regenerative food systems remains too slow and unambitious to adequately address these challenges. The Transforming UK Food Systems Programme comprises a wide range of research projects which address these challenges in a novel place-based, co-produced and action-oriented way. We provide 27 suggested action areas for supporting food system transformation, grouped in five themes spanning production, manufacturing, supply chain and consumption. Among the suggestions, there is a strong emphasis on the importance of co-production with food system actors and affected citizens. We highlight the vital role of governance and policy in supporting these action areas in both a structural and financial way, noting that this needs both national policy and regional approaches to take into account geographically varying cultural circumstances and values, and to allow the high level of co-production necessary.This article is part of the theme issue 'Transforming terrestrial food systems for human and planetary health'.

The significance of consumption for ‘whole system’ transformation has emerged as a key concern for sustainability transitions scholarship. At the same time, attention is now being paid to the responsibilities of different actor groups in transition processes. Responding to these developments, this paper considers the phenomenon of responsible consumption. Rather than focusing on the dispositions or experiences of ‘consumers’, we approach responsible consumption as an organisational field in which the relationships between strategic and collective actors are mediated by the real and discursive figure of ‘the responsible consumer’. In doing so, we aim to contribute theoretical insight and analytic guidance for the study of both consumption and responsibility in transition processes. Our analysis draws on sustained empirical engagement with the contested politics of food consumption in the UK. We focus on three case studies of ostensibly ‘consumer-facing’ policies and initiatives for transition to healthy and sustainable food: carbon labelling, food waste campaigning, and sugar taxation. In each case we explore the concrete mechanisms by which ‘consumers’ are mobilised as the subjects of responsible consumption and trace, over time, the interplay of consumer and corporate responsibility. Crucially, we demonstrate that responsibilisation is a dynamic process that cannot be reduced to the unidirectional transfer of responsibilities from organisations to individuals. To conclude, we make a series of practical recommendations for how ‘consumer-facing’ interventions might be utilised in the context of multi-faceted and multi-actor campaigns for change.

Regenerative agriculture is promoted as a farming system that can improve agricultural sustainability, address soil degradation, and provide ecosystem service benefits. However, there remains limited evidence for the quantifiable benefits of a widespread transition to regenerative agriculture on soil, biodiversity, and crop quality, particularly at the landscape scale, and poor integration of findings across disciplines. Social and cultural aspects of the transition, such as the positioning of regenerative agriculture as a grassroots movement, farmers' perspectives on defining regenerative practices, and social or political barriers to implementation, are harder to quantify and often overlooked in evidence-based approaches. Here, we present the detailed methodology for our interdisciplinary, co-designed landscape-scale experiment measuring changes in soil health, biodiversity, yield, and grain quality, as well as social and political dimensions of the implementation of regenerative practices. Our unique approach, through the co-production process, the landscape-scale, and the focus on a systemic transition instead of individual practices, will bring strong evidence of the benefits of regenerative agriculture for sustained agricultural productivity, the mitigation of climate change and biodiversity depletion in agroecosystems. Our research aims to guide future studies transforming theoretical ecology into testable hypotheses in real-world systems and provide actionable evidence to inform agricultural policies in the UK and beyond.

The adverse consequences of contemporary agri-food relations, particularly in terms of public health and environmental sustainability, have led to growing calls-across interdisciplinary research and policy perspectives-for fundamental systemic change. Focusing on the interconnections and 'workings' of agri-food systems, these accounts have coalesced around the vernacular of transformation to think through the possible ways in which these relations might be configured differently. Against this backdrop, the relationship between food 'production' and food 'consumption' emerges as a key problem. This article revisits debates developed within Sociologia Ruralis approximately two decades ago concerning the terms on which consumption and consumers are brought into agri-food scholarship, arguing that these are given renewed impetus in the context of contemporary calls for agri-food transformation. We build on and advance these previous integrative efforts both by taking stock of recent advances in consumption studies and by responding to the shifting contours of food politics. The analysis focuses on the case of alternative proteins and outlines three substantive bodies of scholarship-the geographies of edibility, the economy of qualities and visceral politics-that we suggest offer considerable potential for renewing and updating the development of integrative perspectives on production and consumption. To conclude, we reflect on the theoretical and practical risks of seeking to reconcile 'production' and 'consumption' and argue that these new integrative concepts may themselves provide more suitable conceptual 'building blocks' for exploring the transformation of agri-food relations.

Within agri-food scholarship, longstanding debates have focused on the empirical applicability and conceptual utility of differing agricultural paradigms. These have often dovetailed with considerations around the future of agriculture in countries such as the UK given a shift in emphasis away from the central tenets of a high-input, yield-oriented productivism. Alternative diagnoses, particularly in notions of a post-productivist paradigm, have proven influential in capturing broad changes in the restructuring of agricultural activity. Whilst debates around the characterisation of these paradigms continue, they highlight distinct contestations in broader (and shifting) questions around what agriculture should be 'for', e.g. whether environmental 'goods' should be valued more highly than material production. Situating our paper within these ongoing debates, we draw on farmer perspectives in examining the adoption of regenerative agricultural practices in two farmer clusters in the East and South-West of England respectively. As a diverse array of practices which appear favourably positioned in a post-Brexit policy environment, we explore the ways in which regenerative agriculture can be understood as seeking to reconcile productivist and post-productivist tendencies. Drawing attention to the tensions, contradictions and uncertainties at play in these farmer perspectives, we highlight: the environmental and emotional appeal of regenerative agriculture compared to its adoption for more pragmatic (economic) reasons; the parallels and differences between regenerative agriculture and organic production; and the multiple sources of trusted information drawn upon by farmers in an uncertain policy environment. We conclude the paper by reflecting on the need to better contextualise and conceptualise contemporary interest in regenerative agriculture within longer theoretical lineages, in which the voice of farmers themselves must be central.

Food regime theory provides a framework of continued and recurring interest to geographical perspectives in charting the contours connecting agri-food and capitalist political economy. Drawing principally on Marxian regulation theory, the analytical framework of food regime theory outlines three periodised regimes from the starting point of 1870 to the present day. Yet there remains ongoing and unresolved debate as to how we characterise the contemporary third regime - and whether it is a regime on its own specific terms or merely an enduring hangover from the second. I argue that an underacknowledged dimension of attempts to characterise the third regime lies in the conjoined relationship between human and planetary health, which the diagnosis of the Anthropocene encourages us to recognise amid tumultuous global environmental change. Given food regime theory's evasive relationship with ecological dynamics within its explanatory framework, I suggest that a "planetary" retheorisation of its central contributions is increasingly prescient. In considering the growing tensions and contradictions afflicting the contemporary regime, and using soy as a working example, I work through three central arguments. First, that a planetary retheorisation serves to reveal the way in which planetary dynamics shape social life, enabling - albeit never wholly determining - food regimes. Second, that what and how people eat in their dietary practices are of planetary significance, which has been to some degree marginalised within the production-centric analyses of food regime theory. Third, that the conceptual Anthropocene highlights how planetary and human health are intricately and inextricably connected, which food regime theory must better account for. I conclude by proposing that the explanatory potential of the contemporary third regime is being stretched, with contested trajectories and nascent contours raising questions around how we might understand quite what we are living through today.

The Independent Review of England’s agri-food systems, commonly known as the National Food Strategy (NFS), was commissioned by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) in 2019. The NFS report, published in two stages in 2020 and 2021, outlines a range of interventions and policy proposals to achieve better agri-food outcomes in terms of public health and environmental sustainability. This commentary focuses on the challenges associated with incorporating a diversity of voices within the NFS’s evidence base. To achieve this, the NFS mobilised a series of public dialogue events to capture lay perspectives. Led by professional facilitators, these events sought to open a deliberative space to explore the workings of agri-food systems, leading to the publication of a public engagement report in late 2021. While diverse views were recorded, the report found ‘a strong appetite for change’ among the participants, eager to address the problems associated with current agri-food systems. In commenting on the dialogue process, we identify three distinct problematics which arise from the NFS’s public engagement strategy. Firstly, we consider the array of subject positions at play in the report. Secondly, we discuss the ‘epistemologies of engagement’, reflecting on the different forms of knowledge that are enrolled through the process of public engagement. Thirdly, we consider the under-acknowledged politics that are at play in these kinds of public engagement exercises and the limits of ‘co-production’ as a methodological principle. We conclude by drawing out the wider (national and international) implications of this particular form of public engagement which aims to incorporate lay perspectives into policy development processes.

By comparing insights from three different fields sites located in the UK, Italy, and China, the authors explore how AFNs, in different ways that are context dependent, are providing a variety of to the mainstream food system. We argue that alternatives have both emerged and been constructed through a variety of social, political and economic responses which are dependent on the local conditions AFNs are derived from, and employing the lenses of locality, scale and food materialities, they suggest that alterity across spatial contexts points to a (hyper) generalised typology that may have interesting implications f or future research.

In this article, I consider how organisations within ‘Alternative’ Food Networks might help us to enact a more-than-human ethic of care in the Anthropocene. Drawing on the diverse economies framework of J.K. Gibson-Graham (2006a, 2006b) as well as readings in the feminist ethics of care literature, I explore an ethnographic study of three community supported agriculture schemes in the north-west of England. While there has been surprisingly little scholarly work linking food and the Anthropocene, much more has been made of the relationship between the food system and Anthropogenic processes of climate change. The orthodox responses to the problems that climate change may bring about are undergirded by Hobbesian visions and the perceived viability of instrumental, technocratic ‘fixes’ that are, for many reasons, worthy of critique. Broadening our viewpoint, and recognising that the Anthropocene and climate change require different responses, I argue that AFNs can provide a more hopeful perspective in how we might understand our existence within a more-than-human world. Rather than reading AFNs through analytical binaries as either reformist or radical entities merely confronting the ills of the food system, I develop an account that instead understands them as open-ended and tantalisingly different forms of organisation (Stock et al., 2015b) that can play a central role in fostering a more-than-human ethics of care for the Anthropocene.