Agriculture is a major contributor to India's environmental footprint, particularly through greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from livestock and fresh water used for irrigation. These impacts are likely to increase in future as agriculture attempts to keep pace with India's growing population and changing dietary preference

Sustainably feeding the next generation is often described as one of the most pressing “grand challenges” facing the 21st century. Generally, scholars propose addressing this problem by increasing agricultural production, investing in technology to boost yields, changing diets, or reducing food waste.

Large-scale survey data are used to question the most public claims about food habits in India. It is found that the extent of overall vegetarianism is much less—and the extent of overall beef-eating much more—than suggested by common claims and stereotypes. The generalised characterisations of “India” are deepened by showing the immense variation of food habits across scale, space, group, class, and gender.

India has among the highest lost years of life from micronutrient deficiencies. We investigate what dietary shifts would eliminate protein, iron, zinc and Vitamin A deficiencies within households’ food budgets and whether these shifts would be compatible with mitigating climate change. This analysis uses the National Sample Survey (2011–12) of consumption expenditure to calculate calorie, protein and the above micronutrient intake deficiencies and relate them to diets, income and location.

Recent years have shown increased awareness that the use of the basic resources water, food, and energy are highly interconnected (referred to as a ‘nexus’). Spatial scales are an important but complicating factor in nexus analyses, and should receive more attention – especially in the policy-oriented literature. In this paper, we ‘unpack' the nexus concept, aiming to understand the differences between water, food and energy resources, especially in terms of spatial scales.

US agriculture was modeled to determine impacts of removing farmed animals on food supply adequacy and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The modeled system without animals increased total food production (23%), altered foods available for domestic consumption, and decreased agricultural US GHGs (28%), but only reduced total US GHG by 2.6 percentage units. Compared with systems with animals, diets formulated for the US population in the plants-only systems had greater excess of dietary energy and resulted in a greater number of deficiencies in essential nutrients.