Out with the lab meat, in with the social reform?
New research reveals widespread pessimism among experts on progress toward sustainable food systems
Ordzonhyd Rudyard Tarco Palomino
This week, my colleagues and I published a new study in the journal Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, where we surveyed over 200 food systems experts from eight countries about the current state of efforts to transform food systems. The results paint a troubling picture.
I’ll cut right to the chase — expert sentiment is overwhelmingly negative. We surveyed experts in eight nations that represent the range of food systems types around the world: China, India, Mexico, Netherlands, Pakistan, Philippines, South Africa, and the US. Experts in all nations except China are deeply concerned that the level of ambition, the strategies being pursued, and the resources going into implementation are simply inadequate to drive the radical reorganization of our food systems that is needed to address challenges like climate change, biodiversity loss, and malnutrition.
When we asked the experts about more than 20 different potential “transformation levers” — policy and technology interventions for making food systems more sustainable, equitable and resilient — a striking pattern emerged. The strategies that received the most support focused on empowering smallholder farmers, advancing regenerative farming methods, and enabling multi-stakeholder collaboration. Meanwhile, cutting-edge technologies like lab-grown meats and high-tech cropping systems were much less popular. This research now provides some of the science backing behind WWF’s Great Food Puzzle dashboard.
To me, our findings point to a growing recognition among experts that we need a diversity of solutions tailored to local contexts. Technological silver bullets that merely eek out marginal new efficiencies from our existing, overly complex systems, won’t save the day on their own. Instead, experts want to see more attention paid to disrupting the realities facing farmers on the ground, and increased investment in research to support the growth of new niches for agroecology and traditional food systems.
Interestingly, experts’ priorities didn’t seem to be determined by the perceived strength of the scientific evidence behind different interventions. Finance and policy levers often ranked high in potential impact even when their scientific basis was seen as relatively weak compared to certain technologies.
This doesn’t mean experts think science is unimportant. But it suggests they believe evidence alone shouldn’t dictate strategy — we must account for social and political realities as well.
Reading between the lines, I believe this study reveals a crucial, ongoing shift in how the food systems community understands the nature of the transformation challenge before us. For decades, we’ve been locked into a mindset narrowly focused on driving progress through increased production, technological advancement and efficiency gains — an approach researchers call “productivism.”
Now, a more holistic, systems-oriented paradigm is taking root. Experts are trying to contextualize scientific and technical knowledge alongside other ways of understanding food system challenges. Issues of equity, power, and self-determination are being recognized as central, not secondary.
While the overall outlook is undeniably bleak, I see glimmers of hope in this growing alignment around the need for deep, structural reforms. Food systems experts are coalescing around a bold new vision — one that puts human rights and agroecology at the center, not the periphery.
Funders, policymakers and the public should take note. To realize the future we want, we must value Indigenous knowledge, secure land rights, empower communities, and fundamentally remake how wealth and power are distributed in the food system.
