With a global pandemic tightening its grip around the world and photos of empty supermarket shelves flooding social media, there’s never been a better time to consider where our food comes from.

Asger Mindegaard explores how ‘agroecology’ can make our food production more resilient, rebuild healthy ecosystems and perhaps even prevent future outbreaks like COVID-19. 

Biting into a delicious sandwich is – literally – like biting into one of the major challenges of our time. The flour of the bread, the lettuce and tomatoes, creamy avocado, the spread, perhaps a slice of meat or a good cheese. All of it affects the world around us in intricate and often hidden ways.

The ways food is produced, processed, packaged, transported, traded, sold, consumed, and wasted has an enormous impact on the environment and the people along the chain, from farm to fork. And according to scientists and many farmers, this impact is negative – for our climate, soil, water, and biodiversity, for rural livelihoods and for our health.

As the world faces an unprecedented global crisis, experts are linking the emergency of COVID-19 to global habitat and biodiversity loss. Researchers at University College London have found that species in degraded habitats are likely to carry more viruses which can infect humans.

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