Future of Animal-sourced Foods (FOAF)

The foods we eat—meat, dairy, eggs, and fish—are being put into a single, quantitative computer model that will track their effects on human health, the climate, water supplies, and ecosystems all at once. This matters because current policy decisions about food are made in silos: agricultural subsidies ignore heart disease, and climate targets overlook water pollution. No existing tool brings together the health, economic, and environmental consequences of changing what we eat and how it is produced. The project fills that gap by building an integrated model that can test the effects of taxes, subsidies, labelling, or new production methods before they are implemented. If the research succeeds, governments and international bodies will have a practical tool to design food policies that deliver genuine co-benefits—for example, reducing red meat consumption in ways that lower greenhouse gas emissions *and* cut rates of colorectal cancer, without unintended harm to farmers or water supplies. A dedicated work stream in China will test how these dynamics play out in the world’s largest food system. The project also includes experiments to develop new interventions that shift consumer behaviour, and a social-science component to understand why some policies fail due to political or cultural resistance. The result could be smarter, more resilient food regulation that quietly shapes what ends up on dinner plates and what stays in the ground.