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New study quantifies how food production drives species extinction risk – with enormous variation across foods and regions
A study led by members of the Mandala Consortium at the University of Cambridge, has revealed that the impact of food production on species extinction risk can differ by up to a thousand times depending on the type of food and where it is produced. These findings, published in Nature Food in September 2025, provide fresh insights into how changing food policies could help reduce biodiversity loss.
Can Recipe Boxes improve our diets?
Can recipe boxes give families with school-aged children the opportunity to access more affordable healthy food?
In this episode of The Food Foundation’s podcast – Pod Bites – the MRC Epidemiology Unit’s Noah Cooke discusses how families in Birmingham are involved in the Recipe Box research and randomised control trial, which is believed to be the first of its kind.
Greener plates at Birmingham Children’s Hospital
At Mandala we’re conducting a range of research projects across Birmingham to investigate how the food system is changing right now, and how it could change in the future. We’re checking in on these projects through a series of short films – Stories from a Changing Food System – produced by Good Stories in Food.
Our new film profiles our research with Birmingham Children’s Hospital, who are taking a new approach to hospital catering that’s good for the planet as well as patients. The hospital’s catering and dietitians have been redesigning menus to cut their environmental impact while maintaining, even improving, nutritional quality and appeal to young patients.
Stories from a Changing Food System: Change Kitchen
At Mandala we’re conducting a range of research projects across Birmingham to investigate how the food system is changing right now, and how it could change in the future.
We’ll be checking in on these projects through a series of short films – Stories from a Changing Food System – produced by Good Stories in Food.
The first of these films profiles our research with Change Kitchen, a social enterprise in Balsall Health, Birmingham which is aiming to provide healthy, sustainable and affordable vegetarian food.
The City of a Thousand Flavours – Reflections on a Birmingham visit
In early December, members of the Mandala Consortium visited Birmingham to explore different aspects of the city’s food environment, systems and culture. In a packed 24 hours, researchers from the team visited a primary school, a hospital, the city markets, shops and restaurants, a fruit and vegetable wholesaler and a community growing site. We heard about how food is produced, processed, moved and consumed in the city. It’s not possible in this short space to cover everything we learned, but we wanted to share a few highlights.
New consortium funded to deliver systems research programme to transform urban food system
The MRC Epidemiology Unit is leading one of four multi-million pound interdisciplinary research programmes awarded funding to support the transformation of the UK food system.
The research is being funded through the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Strategic Priorities Fund (SPF). Each of the five-year programmes will address issues such as obesity, sustainable agriculture and global warming, placing healthy people and a healthy natural environment at their centre
The Mandala Consortium
The Mandala Consortium, led by Professor Martin White, Professor of Population Health Research in the MRC Epidemiology Unit, University of Cambridge will focus on transforming urban food systems for planetary and population health. Centred on the city of Birmingham, this consortium brings together internationally renowned teams from the Universities of Cambridge, Birmingham, Warwick, Exeter, and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
The Consortium aims to transform the urban food system and its relationship with its regional economy in the West Midlands. Mapping of the local food system will determine the most powerful levers for system change. These are likely to include new ways of procuring healthier and more sustainable foods in the public sector, and developing online systems to help businesses find and use more locally grown food. Interventions will be evaluated to demonstrate how food can be made healthier, more affordable and less harmful to the environment, but still profitable.