Food, in brief

India's food regulator, the FSSAI, has proposed warning labels on the front of packaged food and drink, and India's Supreme Court hears the plan on 10 September. [1]

A product would only be flagged if it is high in two of three things: sugar, salt and fat. [1]

No other country with warning labels works that way. Every one of them prints a separate warning for each nutrient in excess. [1]

A Kellogg's multigrain Chocos box in India is 27% added sugar by weight. Its salt and fat sit inside the limits, so it would carry no warning at all. [1]

Honey, jaggery and other foods that are naturally sugary or fatty are exempt from the rule outright. [1]

India's government dropped an earlier warning-label plan in March, after Coca-Cola and industry groups backing Nestle and PepsiCo opposed it, Reuters reported in August. [1][2]

Nestle's chief executive, Philipp Navratil, said food makers should be consulted so that the rules are done scientifically. [2]

Food companies object to a second number. India would judge a product per 100 grams rather than per serving, and one executive said nobody eats 100 grams of pickle or ketchup. [1]

By the food industry's own estimate, nearly 80% of India's packaged food and drink is high in fat, sugar or salt. [2]

Chile began printing a separate black octagon for each nutrient in excess in 2016. Sugary-drink buying there fell 23.7% over the next 18 months, a study in the journal PLOS Medicine found. [1]

The same drink is not the same everywhere. A can of Fanta sold in Britain has 63 calories; the same size sold in India has 185. [2]

India's retail sales of heavily processed food rose 40 times between 2006 and 2019, to $38bn. About 180 million Indian adults were overweight or obese in 2021, and one study in The Lancet puts that at 450 million by 2050. [1]

Why it matters. Watch what India's judges do with the two-nutrient rule on 10 September; if it stands, the 100-gram benchmark is the next number the companies will argue about. [1]

The US Department of Agriculture rated 31% of Kansas corn and 24% of its soybeans poor or very poor on 31 August. It cut the state's corn yield forecast to 126 bushels an acre, from 145 last year. [3]

Why it matters. Nearly half of Kansas is in moderate or severe drought after a month of high-90s heat, so this is weather, not a bad seed year. [3]

Oklahoma will average 95 bushels of corn an acre this year, 27 fewer than in 2025 and about half the US average of 180.7, the USDA forecast. South Carolina and Colorado are next worst. [4]

Why it matters. The famous corn states get the attention, but the sharpest falls are on the dry edges of the belt.

November soybeans rose 24 cents to $13.12 on 1 September, after China bought 136,000 tonnes. Chicago wheat had fallen 20 cents on 31 August, after Turkey said it wants a new Black Sea grain corridor. [5][6]

Why it matters. The three-year wheat high was built on the Black Sea being shut, and a route reopening takes it apart. [35][36]

Traders expect money managers are holding close to a record bet on higher grain prices. Grain prices were hit with selling pressure overnight on 2 September, and the next big US crop report lands on 11 September. [7]

Why it matters. A rally this crowded needs fresh bullish news almost every day to hold. [7]

December 2027 corn is trading near $5.30 a bushel, November 2027 soybeans above $12, and July 2027 Chicago wheat above $7.50. Those are levels not seen in three years. [8]

Why it matters. A farmer can lock in a profit on a crop nobody has planted, which was not possible in the last two seasons.

US Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced a package on 31 August to rebuild the American beef herd, which sits at a 75-year low. It includes insurance that pays a rancher the gap when keeping a heifer for breeding is worth less than selling her for meat. [9]

Why it matters. A cow takes years to become beef, so the only lever available now is making it worth not selling her.

At the Farm Progress Show in Boone, Iowa on 1 September, Rollins announced a plan to modernise US farm data. It would use satellite crop monitoring, geospatial analysis and records USDA already holds. [10]

Why it matters. US crop estimates move world prices, so changing where those numbers come from changes what everyone trades on.

Fertiliser and fuel will cost more in 2027, but better crop prices lift projected returns per acre above recent years, the farmdoc team at the University of Illinois found. Returns still sit below their long-run average. [11]

Why it matters. A small fall in price would push those thin margins straight back into loss. [11]

All 212 plant-based burgers, sausages and milks bought in UK shops contained at least one of 19 mycotoxins - poisons made by moulds growing on grains, beans and seeds. Every level measured was below EU guidelines. [12]

Why it matters. The researchers, at the University of Parma and Cranfield University, say there are no rules yet requiring anyone to monitor mycotoxins in new foods. [12]

Among 17,710 people in a Canadian and a British study, those with the most xylitol in their blood had 57% and 18% higher rates of heart attack, stroke and death than those with the least. [13]

Why it matters. Both studies only watched people, so they show a pattern and not a cause. Xylitol is a sugar substitute used in gum, jam and ice cream. [13]

California's legislature passed AB 2244 with no votes against, 32-0 and 72-0, creating a voluntary Non-Ultraprocessed Certified seal. Governor Gavin Newsom has until 30 September to sign it. [14]

Why it matters. Large grocers would have to display sealed products in busy parts of the store, which turns a label into shelf space.

The US health department opened a $32.5m fund last week for schools to swap heavily processed foods for whole ones. Grants run from $75,000 to $2.5m, and applications open in mid-September. [15]

Why it matters. It buys experiments rather than one national menu, so what works has to be found before it can be copied.

The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine asked a US federal court to withdraw the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, saying a secret panel shaped them. Eight of that panel's nine members had ties to meat, dairy or egg industry groups, the suit claims. [16][17]

Why it matters. Those guidelines decide what US school lunches and food aid buy, so who wrote them decides what millions of people eat.

104,806 French adults were followed for eight years. Men whose meal times shifted between work days and days off had a 14% higher rate of heart disease, and a 21% higher rate of coronary heart disease. No such link showed up in women. [18]

Why it matters. The measure was when people ate, not what, taken from repeated food diaries. [18]

German researchers scored the same people against ten different healthy-diet measures. Very few landed in the top quarter of more than one, yet all ten pointed at the same biological pathways. [19]

Why it matters. Which diet counts as healthy depends on the scoresheet, which is the labelling fight above, run in a laboratory.

Among 1,404 pregnant women in Germany, those eating a vegetable-rich pattern gave birth later and to longer babies than several other groups. Women on a heavily processed pattern weighed most before and gained most during pregnancy. [20]

Why it matters. It is a pattern observed in one group, not a trial, so it cannot separate the diet from everything that travels with it.

Researchers froze whole-legume purees in one direction, so the growing ice pushed the solids into aligned walls that set into a firm, fibrous gel on thawing. It worked on chickpeas, soy, peas, lentils, lupins, beans and mung beans - 96% of world legume production. [21]

Why it matters. It needs an ordinary freezer and no additives, so it skips the factory step that separates protein out first.

Meeting Indonesia's target of 50% biodiesel in its fuel by 2030 would need 4.85 to 8.55 million hectares of new land, and rice self-sufficiency up to 2.3 million more, researchers calculated. The two would compete for the same ground. [22]

Why it matters. Clearing it would release up to 3,753 million tonnes of greenhouse gas for palm oil alone, swamping Indonesia's own climate pledges. [22]

Testing 187 bread wheats against 17,711 genetic markers, researchers found 35 candidate genes linked to how the plants grew and yielded under drought and heat together. Twelve were strongly switched on by drought, heat and the two combined. [23]

Why it matters. Drought and heat almost always arrive together, and most breeding has tested them one at a time.

Researchers used records from more than a million North American trees. Warming and drought together worsen insect and disease damage in regions that were historically colder and wetter, and reduce it in regions already warmer and drier, they found. [24]

Why it matters. Pest pressure is not rising everywhere. It is moving, and the growers who have never had it are the ones with no defence.

A study of 401 conflicts over coasts worldwide, involving at least 275 Indigenous groups, found energy, mining and biomass projects were the main drivers. Reported harms included lost seascapes and displacement from ancestral lands and seas. [25]

Why it matters. How badly a community was hit depended on the sector involved and on whether its rights were legally recognised. [25]

Hallie Shoffner quit farming land her family had worked for over a century in Arkansas, and is now running for the US Senate as a Democrat. Nobody in the US capital realises how bad things are right now, she told Reuters. [26]

Why it matters. Farm-belt anger is starting to show up as votes rather than only as balance sheets.

New World screwworm is a fly whose maggots eat living flesh. The US food safety inspection service is widening its laboratory tests, across more livestock species, for traces of the veterinary drugs now used against it. [27]

Why it matters. Treating an outbreak puts new chemicals into animals that later become meat, so the testing has to widen with it.

The Global Food Tech Awards named ten finalists for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. They include Betta Choc, which ferments discarded date seeds into a cocoa substitute, and Hemisphere, whose hemp-seed protein it says is 65% protein. [28]

Why it matters. Date seeds and hemp are both attempts to sidestep a crop whose price keeps running away from the buyer.

Food brands are labelling products GLP-1 friendly, but 76% of 63 health experts in a 2026 US News survey said fast muscle loss is a serious risk for people on weight-loss drugs like Ozempic. Danone's Oikos Fusion is one of the few products built for it. [29]

Why it matters. Losing weight quickly strips muscle as well as fat, and a friendly label does not tell anyone that.

Using 25 climate models across four scenarios, researchers project meteorological droughts in Iran becoming more frequent and more severe by 2071 to 2100. [30]

Why it matters. It is a projection about the end of the century, not a forecast for any harvest, and Iran is one of the arid places the study says are most exposed to swings in temperature and rain. [30]

Nutrient management rarely joins up three things at once: what a crop demands, the balance of carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus in the soil, and the microbes that release them, researchers argued. [31]

Why it matters. Fertiliser is dosed to the plant, and the soil life that decides how much of it the plant can actually reach is left out of the sum.

The US disease agency has reported 10 salmonella outbreaks in 2026, traced to jalapeno peppers, backyard poultry, shell eggs, moringa leaf powder and pet reptiles. The yearly count has held roughly steady for five years. [32]

Why it matters. It feels like more because each outbreak is announced separately and the sources look nothing like each other.

Heat indexes were forecast at about 103F in parts of central and southern Iowa on 31 August, and at 100F to 106F in parts of southern Illinois, southern Indiana and western Kentucky through that week. Warm nights and little overnight relief prompted a multi-day advisory. [33]

Why it matters. Corn and soybeans filling their grain in that heat is what turns a forecast into a smaller harvest.

Globe artichokes are at their peak in Australia and selling for A$2 to A$3.99 each, and a warmer winter has made this a particularly good asparagus season, a Sydney market manager said. [34]

Why it matters. A mild winter reaches the greengrocer weeks before it reaches a yield report.