Food, in brief

President Trump signed two executive orders aimed at American ranchers on 4 September, and the US Department of Agriculture announced four more actions the same day. [1]

The first order tells the US interior department to decide whether grey wolves and Mexican wolves can come off the endangered species list, and to make it easier to shoot predators legally. [2]

The same order tells the agriculture department to review whether it can make country-of-origin labels compulsory on beef. [2]

The second order tells the department to prioritise investigations of the meat packers - the firms that buy ranchers' cattle - for restraining trade or manipulating prices, and to report to Trump on enforcement within a year. [2]

It also tells the food safety service to widen the programme that lets state-inspected meat cross state lines, and to remove reporting requirements it judges unnecessary. [2][4]

The US cattle herd is the smallest since the 1950s, which the department calls a 75-year low. [1][3]

Nothing signed on Thursday adds an animal. The department's own new insurance, announced on 31 August, covers a young female kept for breeding over a two-year period. [3]

The department also said it will push other parts of the US government, including its health, justice, veterans and war departments, to buy American beef for prisons and hospitals. [2]

Its own page names the harder problem. The average American farmer is 58.1 years old, with more than 1.2 million producers over 65 and about 57,000 under 25. [2]

A food company running farmer programmes reports the same shape worldwide: the average farmer is around 58, 9% of US producers are under 35, and 11% of European farm managers are under 40. [6]

Money is not the obvious missing piece. Government economists forecast the average farm business's net cash income up 18.7% to $135,000 this year, with cattle farms the one livestock group whose income is rising. [5]

Why it matters. Watch whether the interior department actually moves to delist the wolves and whether a mandatory beef label is written into a rule; both are reviews so far, and neither carries a date. [2]

The Trump administration is closing two of the three US agriculture department research projects that study cyclospora, the stomach parasite behind this summer's outbreak, Politico reported and Reuters relayed on 30 August. [7] Congress did not fund the two projects, at the Beltsville research centre outside Washington, for the 2026 financial year. [7] The third keeps its money but is being moved from Maryland to Iowa, and every scientist working on the parasite has declined to go. [7] The department says none of the research has been disrupted. [7]

Why it matters. More than 17,000 Americans were confirmed sick this summer, with nearly 500 admitted to hospital and two dead. [9] Reuters wrote on 4 September that the outbreak has exposed a weakened US public health system. [8]

US federal agencies have published about 170 food recalls so far in 2026, against 320 in all of 2025 and 296 in 2024, Civil Eats reported on 3 September. [9] So recalls are not rising. Illnesses are: cyclospora sickened more than 17,000 people this summer against 1,180 confirmed cases last summer. [9] Sarah Sorscher of the Center for Science in the Public Interest said nobody can say whether American food is safer or less safe than before. [9] Her reason is FoodNet, the joint federal and state network that tracks foodborne illness: it was never adequately funded. [9]

Why it matters. Lettuce prices fell 16.4% from June to July as shoppers avoided it, and farms in California's Salinas Valley abandoned crops and cut staff. [9]

More than a million American children have lost food stamps since the One Big Beautiful Bill Act was signed in July 2025, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. [19] That reaches beyond the household. A US programme called the Community Eligibility Provision pays for free meals for every child in a school when at least a quarter of pupils are on assistance, and covers the whole bill at 62.5%. [19] More than 49,000 public schools used it in 2024-25, and districts in San Antonio, Houston and Miami-Dade have ended universal free meals this school year. [19]

Why it matters. Diane Pratt-Heavner of the School Nutrition Association called it a possible tip of the iceberg, and said the full effect will show over several years rather than this term. [19]

The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization wants fish farming to grow 75%, and has not said which species or systems should deliver it. [12] Farmed salmon and shrimp eat meat, and are fed on fishmeal and fish oil made by grinding down small wild fish such as anchovies and sardines. [12] The Changing Markets Foundation modelled the possible routes with the University of British Columbia. [12] A path weighted to those species could push demand for wild fish to 41.4m tonnes a year by 2040, equal to 46% of the entire 2020 wild catch. [12] Fish eaten per person in Senegal, a centre of fishmeal production, fell by more than 10kg between 1999 and 2019. [12]

Why it matters. Fish farming already supplies more than half the aquatic animals people eat, so how it grows decides whether a sardine reaches a west African plate or a feed bag. [12]

Jersey, a self-governing island off the coast of France, has more than tripled the area of sea closed to trawling and dredging. [13] Stephen Viney, who heads the island's fishermen's association, said the fleet is losing some of its most productive grounds and that the change had been a slow car crash coming. [13] The environment minister, Mary Le Hegarat, said the measures were evidence-led and built through consultation. [13] The closed patches include maerl, a seaweed that hardens into reef-like beds; conservationists say about 200 species have been recorded in a small area of it. [13]

Why it matters. Fishers were given new licences for bluefin tuna and a local restaurant has put it on the menu, but the tuna season is short and the lost grounds were year-round. [13]

The Environment Agency, which regulates rivers in England, counts salmon and sea trout swimming upstream on the Tyne, Wear and Tees. [14] The counter on the Wear has not worked since the start of 2025, and a fault on the Tyne means every month but one this year is an estimate. [14] The Tyne's working counters recorded 6,471 fish in July, against 11,845 in the last July that was actually counted, in 2022. [14] Only 30 fish were logged on the Tees before July. [14] The agency says it is too early to draw conclusions and is negotiating a contract to repair the Wear counter. [14]

Why it matters. The Tyne is the only English river whose salmon are classed as not at risk, and the agency's own forecast is that it loses that status by 2029. [14]

Fishermen in Italy's Po Delta, south of Venice, burned most of the Atlantic blue crabs they caught for two years, because few Italians would eat the alien predator that was wiping out their prized Manila clams. [15] The Polesine cooperative's revenue fell 75% to 15m euros across 2024 and 2025, and its active members dropped from 1,500 to 850. [15] It switched to exporting the crabs, has sold every one it caught this year, and forecasts 20m euros in revenue. [15] Containment experiments continue, including releasing tens of thousands of octopuses to eat them. [15]

Why it matters. The market came back faster than the fishermen did: revenue is above where it started and the cooperative is still 650 members short. [15]

Kernza is a perennial grain - sown once and harvested for several seasons instead of replanted every year - that the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas has been domesticating since 2001. [16] Its roots reach several feet down, so it rides out short droughts and soaks up heavy rain that would otherwise wash soil away. [16] It also yields only 20 to 40% of what wheat yields in the same area, because the plant spends energy on roots as well as seed. [16] Last year Kernza covered 3,511 US acres, against 37.2 million acres of wheat. [16]

Why it matters. Bryce Black, a fourth-generation Kansas farmer, harvested his lowest wheat yield since 2017 after a dry winter and spring, and says a crop he would not have to replant for four or five years is what makes it tempting. [16]

Some US crop support payments are worked out from a Price Loss Coverage base yield: a per-acre figure fixed from a historic period and left alone until Congress updates it. [18] Seeds and methods keep improving, so the frozen figure drifts below what farms actually grow. Agricultural economists writing for Farmdoc found that for the 2025 crop year, barley, oats, rapeseed, corn, soybeans and two kinds of rice all sat more than 20% below their trend yields. [18] Only lentils, chickpeas and mustard were above. [18] Payments also run on historic base acres, which in 2025 ranged from 200% above planted acres for barley to 86% below for rapeseed. [18]

Why it matters. Landowners were allowed to decline updates when they were offered, so the payments have piled up in whichever crops paid best at the time rather than whatever is in the ground. [18]

Researchers at the University of Leeds built a computer model that predicts which plant proteins can act as emulsifiers, the ingredients that hold oil and water together so a sauce or a burger does not separate. [17] Screening tens of millions of candidates, it found nearly 800. [17] The emulsifiers widely used today include dairy ones such as casein and whey, so plant versions matter to firms making meat substitutes. [17] Until now the search was trial and error; the team tested its method against pea and potato proteins already sold and found it worked. [17]

Why it matters. Many of the proteins it turned up had never been considered for the job, which is the part a laboratory bench could not have done in the time. [17]

The US Food Safety and Inspection Service said on 4 September that the deadline for its Strengthening Processing for US Ranchers programme, a $500m fund helping regional beef plants with the cost of buying cattle, has moved to 30 September. [2][4] The same bulletin says the two executive orders direct the service to expand state inspection programmes and support small processors. [4] Its administrator, Justin Ransom, told a food safety conference in Arkansas on 3 September about pilots shortening the salmonella testing window for poultry plants and widening surface sampling for listeria in ready-to-eat plants. [4]

Why it matters. The orders ask the same agency to cut reporting requirements and to widen inspection to more small plants at once, and its administrator points to its workforce and data systems as what lets it move quickly on risk. [2][4]

A salmonella outbreak linked to pumpkin seeds has infected 81 people in France, Reuters reported on 4 September. [10] Salmonella is the second most common foodborne illness in the world and infects about 1.35 million Americans a year, with roughly 26,500 hospital admissions. [11] An outbreak is counted when two or more people fall ill from the same food, and US regulators have logged ten salmonella outbreaks in 2026, tied to jalapenos, backyard poultry, shell eggs, moringa powder and pet reptiles. [11]

Why it matters. Seeds are eaten raw and keep for months, so a contaminated batch sits in cupboards long after the notice goes out.

The average farmer worldwide is about 58 years old, 9% of US producers are under 35, and 11% of European farm managers are under 40. [6] PepsiCo, one of the world's largest food and drink companies, runs training and mentoring schemes for young farmers in Europe, the United States and South Africa, its social impact head Monica Baur told AgFunderNews on 1 September. [6] She named three barriers that recur everywhere: the cost of land, money and machinery; missing skills and routes into the work; and communities too weak for a family to stay in. [6]

Why it matters. A company that buys crops has a direct reason to care who grows them in fifteen years, which is roughly when the current generation finishes retiring. [6]

Mexicans eat more salt than the World Health Organization recommends, and researchers writing in the Journal of Human Hypertension on 3 September argue the country's response is too fragmented to change that. [20] Mexico already puts warning labels on the front of packages and limits ultra-processed food sold in schools. [20] The authors call those isolated measures, and want a single national programme covering monitoring, reformulation by manufacturers, marketing rules, taxes and the places people actually buy food. [20] High blood pressure is the largest changeable driver of heart disease deaths in the country. [20]

Why it matters. It is a comment piece rather than a new study, and it is arguing about sequencing: whether partial measures add up or cancel out. [20]

Fifty people in Hungary tasted boiled potato, chips and mashed potato in a mixed real-and-virtual setting, while being shown NOVA processing classifications and Nutri-Score nutrition grades. [21] How much people liked the three did not differ significantly, and the interaction between the product and the information shown was not significant either. [21] What did differ was which they thought healthiest and would be willing to eat: boiled potato came out most favourably and chips least. [21]

Why it matters. It is one small trial published in npj Science of Food, and it suggests the ranking people already carry did most of the work the labels were meant to do. [21]

Thirty-two Brazilians aged 50 to 80 with high blood pressure were split into two groups for twelve weeks. [22] Everyone walked, jogged and did calisthenics twice a week on an outdoor track; half also got six group sessions on food quality based on Brazil's dietary guidelines, with no calorie limit. [22] Twenty-nine finished. [22] Fasting blood glucose ended 10 mg/dL lower in the group that got the food sessions. [22] Blood pressure fell within that group, but the gap between the two groups was not statistically significant, and body composition and fitness did not differ. [22]

Why it matters. The authors report it as a test of whether community exercise programmes can carry nutrition sessions at all, not as a finding about any particular food. [22]

Boston Borough Council in eastern England has pushed the start of its household food waste collections from September to 19 October, because parts for its new recycling lorries were held up by disruption in the Strait of Hormuz. [23] The strait is the narrow sea route out of the Gulf, largely closed by Iran after US and Israeli strikes in February, with traffic still heavily restricted. [23] Weekly food waste collection became a legal requirement for councils in England in March. [23] Once running, the waste is turned into energy and fertiliser. [23]

Why it matters. A shipping route thousands of miles away decides when a household in Lincolnshire starts sending its leftovers to a digester instead of a landfill. [23]

The US House of Representatives voted 370 to 48 on 1 September for a short-term bill keeping the US federal government funded past the end of the financial year on 30 September, and the US Senate had already passed it. [24] Lawmakers wanted to avoid a repeat of last autumn's 43-day shutdown and a 76-day shutdown of the homeland security department, both of which fell in the middle of a campaign. [24]

Why it matters. The annual agriculture spending bill is the same instrument that removed the money from two US cyclospora research projects for this financial year. [7]

In Langrug, an informal settlement in South Africa's Western Cape, researchers including Kevin Winter built a treatment system on an abandoned wastewater site. [25] River water is pumped by solar power through cells of large stones, then biochar - wood burned at 800C - then smaller stones and sand, taking five days. [25] Winter says it removes about 99% of the toxins before the water goes back to the river, and about 3,000 litres is held back to irrigate food gardens. [25] Langrug has grown from 3,000 people to more than 26,000, mostly on seasonal farm work. [25]

Why it matters. The Western Cape came close to running its reservoirs dry in 2018, and about 31,000 farm workers in the region lost their jobs in the drought that caused it. [25]