Consumer confidence in the food industry has plummeted in the wake of successive food scandals: Nestlé subsidiary Buitoni pizzas infected with Escherichia coli, Ferrero’s Kinder chocolates contaminated with salmonella, and Lactalis cheeses carrying listeria. Experts blame a broken system and players obsessed with profitability.

This is what a British researcher has discovered by studying four species of mushroom. Mushrooms exchange electrical signals with each other, which he likened to a form of communication. He identified 50 patterns of electrical spikes, or 50 “words”, and conducted a linguistic comparison with English, Swedish and Russian; it turns out that the length of the “words” would show similarities with English and Russian.

70% of global greenhouse gas emissions are generated by urban areas, according to a report by IPCC experts. It is therefore essential to rethink the city in order to combat global warming, by creating neighborhoods with all the essential shops and infrastructures such as bakeries, pharmacies and schools close to home, with the aim of banishing cars from cities and favoring soft mobility.

To limit warming to just 1.5 degrees Celsius, nations would need to collectively reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by around 43% by 2030, and stop adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere altogether by the early 2050s, according to the report. Unfortunately, this is not the trend of current government policies.

Scientists at Stanford University have invented solar panels that operate at night, harvesting infrared light to provide energy. Working like a conventional solar panel during the day to harvest the sun’s energy, the panel “turns upside down” to continue producing electricity at night, provided the sky is clear of clouds.

Preparatory talks for the UN Biodiversity Summit in Kunming, China, ended last week in Geneva without resolving many of the key elements of the Global Biodiversity Framework. The countries have agreed to meet again in Nairobi in June to try to resolve the issues surrounding a global agreement to reverse the loss of biodiversity.

The #SiJétaisElles campaign uses humor to denounce the sexism reserved for women, through eight interviews with top executives, including Kering boss François-Henri Pinault. “What’s your morning routine?”, “How do you manage your mental load on a daily basis?”. These questions are never put to bosses, although they are very often addressed to women company directors.

The Responsible Jewellery Council aims to set industry standards for supply chain responsibility and “promote trust in the global jewelry and watchmaking sector”. Its code of conduct stipulates that members must ensure that “beneficial owners do not appear on relevant government lists of persons or organizations involved in… or financing conflicts”.

Clothing and footwear fall within the scope of the January 1, 2022 anti-waste law, which bans the destruction of non-food products. This law is a welcome step in the fight against waste, but it must not overshadow the need to reflect on the reduction of unsold produce and management practices in this sector. Like all good waste, the most virtuous unsold product is that which is not produced.

In this article, the scientists highlight the fact that the war against Ukraine reveals that our food system is unfair and unsustainable. But the food crisis threatening Europe has much longer roots, and solutions do exist: they propose three levers for dealing with short-term shocks to the food system, while ensuring human health and sustainable development in the long term.