Publications

Matilda Baraibar Norberg, Lisa Deutsch. 2023. Ch 2: The first soybean cycle (domestication to 900 CE). The Soybean Through World History. Routledge Studies in Food, Society and the Environment. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367822866-2

The archaeological record and the earliest available sources suggest that the deep history of soy reaches back several millennia. Based on a thorough overview of early Chinese texts, this chapter details the roles of soy under the first cycle (from domestication to 900 CE). During the roots phase (from soy’s origins to roughly 200 BCE), soybeans were grown as one among several crops in the highly stratified early agricultural ...

Matilda Baraibar Norberg, Lisa Deutsch. 2023. Ch 3: The second soybean cycle (1000–1860). The Soybean Through World History. Routledge Studies in Food, Society and the Environment. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367822866-3

This chapter examines the second soy cycle, which begins to take root around the turn of the first millennium, under the Song Dynasty (960–1279). Soy now begins to take key and manifold roles outside China, reaching into East and Southeast Asia. The full regime phase, discernible approximately between 1650 and 1790, is marked by “rise of the West”, and by the Dutch and British commercial penetration of East Asia. Under this cy...

Matilda Baraibar Norberg, Lisa Deutsch. 2023. Ch 4: The roots of the third soybean cycle (1860–1949). The Soybean Through World History. Routledge Studies in Food, Society and the Environment. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367822866-4

This chapter is devoted to the roles and functions of soy exclus during the roots phase of the third soy cycle, the period 1860–1949 that leads up to the regime. By the mid-19th century, soy had not yet become a key global commodity. However, the set of transformative forces rooted in this phase – new technologies, commodity chain activities s, uses and power configurations – would ultimately usher in the post-World War II reg...

Matilda Baraibar Norberg, Lisa Deutsch. 2023. Ch 5: The regime of the third soybean cycle (1950–today). The Soybean Through World History. Routledge Studies in Food, Society and the Environment. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367822866-5

This chapter analyzes the third soy regime – when the United States took the helm of the global food system and the soybean was inserted into the industrialized (mechanized and high input) agriculture of Corn Belt in 1950. The soybean fit perfectly into the Western vision of the Green Revolution in food production – to provide large enough quantities that are cheap enough to allow access to feed poor “underdeveloped” populatio...

Matilda Baraibar Norberg, Lisa Deutsch. 2023. Chapter 6: Historicizing soy Toward a new rupture? The Soybean Through World History. Routledge Studies in Food, Society and the Environment. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367822866-6

This chapter discusses the social-ecological challenges and contradictions of the current soy regime from the vantage point of historical legacies and breaks. As regimes are historical and eventually contradictions and limits trigger their end, we analyze the signs of an approaching rupture phase. We focus on three different types of challenges. The first is a crisis of structure in the longue durée, which involves the idea th...

Coste, Madeleine, Pereira, Laura, Charman, Andrew, Petersen, Leif, Hawkes, Corinna. 2023. 'Hampers' as an effective strategy to shift towards sustainable diets in South African low-income communities. Development Southern Africa. https://doi.org/10.1080/0376835X.2022.2028605

Transitioning towards sustainable diets is imperative to avoid the worst effects of climate change, environmental degradation, and malnutrition. In South Africa, households most vulnerable to food insecurity employ various strategies to access food. These include purchasing hampers; a combination of staple foods sold in bulk at a discounted price, which are cake wheat flour, super maize meal, white sugar, cooking oil, and whit...

Rachel Mazac, Natasha Järviö, Hanna L. Tuomisto. 2023. Environmental and nutritional Life Cycle Assessment of novel foods in meals as transformative food for the future. Science of the Total Environment. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.162796

Sustainable diets are key for mitigating further anthropogenic climate change and meeting future health and sustainability goals globally. Given that current diets need to change significantly, novel/future foods (e.g., insect meal, cultured meat, microalgae, mycoprotein) present options for protein alternatives in future diets with lower total environmental impacts than animal source foods. Comparisons at the more concrete me...

Iryna Herzon, Rachel Mazac, Maijaliisa Erkkola, Tara Garnett, Helena Hansson, Minna Kaljonen, Teea Kortetmäki, Annika Lonkila, Malin Jonell, Mari Helena Niva, Anne-Maria Pajari, Theresa Margarete Tribaldos, Marjaana Toivonen, Hanna L. Tuomisto, Kari Koppelmäki, Elin Röös. 2023. A rebalanced discussion of the roles of livestock in society. Nature food. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-023-00866-y

The many roles of animals in modern agriculture and food systems have come under considerable scrutiny in the context of sustainability. A recent Correspondence1 presented The Dublin Declaration of scientists, outlining the societal roles of meat, as well as the key messages aimed to rebalance contemporary debates on the role of meat and livestock (first presented in a special issue on the same topic that accompanied the Decla...

Amanda Jonsson. 2022. A sensory evaluation of swidden rye (Secale cereale) – how the taste of history and geographical location can play part in a sustainable food production. DiVA.

Due to their resilience, durability, and broad genetic variations, increasing the production and consumption of landrace cereals has been highlighted as a solution to handle increasing environmental variability resulting from climate change. However, the consumption of landrace cereals remains low due to limited production and purchase availability for consumers. To increase knowledge and possibly the production and consumptio...

A. Charlotte Bunge, Amanda Wood, Afton Halloran, Line J. Gordon. 2022. A systematic scoping review of the sustainability of vertical farming, plant-based alternatives, food delivery services and blockchain in food systems. Nature Food. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-022-00622-8

Food system technologies (FSTs) are being developed to accelerate the transformation towards sustainable food systems. Here we conducted a systematic scoping review that accounts for multiple dimensions of sustainability to describe the extent, range and nature of peer-reviewed literature that assesses the sustainability performance of four FSTs: plant-based alternatives, vertical farming, food deliveries and blockchain techno...