Food, in brief

About 1,950 students, teachers and boarding-school pupils fell ill between Tuesday and Thursday after eating meals from Indonesia's free school meals scheme. [1]

The outbreaks hit five provinces at once: East Java, Central Java, West Sumatra, Aceh and South Sulawesi. [1]

The largest was in Rembang, in Central Java, where 752 students and 25 teachers at one state high school had diarrhoea, nausea, vomiting and stomach pain. [1]

In Sidoarjo, in East Java, 730 people were affected, most of them pupils at an Islamic boarding school; 706 have since been sent home. [1]

No deaths have been reported, and officials say they are still investigating what caused the outbreaks. [1]

Since the scheme began in January 2025, food poisoning linked to it has affected 50,059 people in 560 separate incidents across 36 provinces. [1]

The National Nutrition Agency does not cook the meals. It pays about 27,000 privately run kitchens to do it, and is now reviewing all of them. [1]

At least 833 of those kitchens have been shut for failing hygiene and sanitation rules, and inspectors say they found hundreds of facilities that do not exist. [1]

The agency's own reviews blame 80% to 90% of earlier outbreaks on broken routines: storage, checking ingredients on arrival, temperature control and use-by deadlines. [1]

The scheme is meant to reach nearly 90 million students, toddlers and pregnant women, and to cost about $28bn by 2029. [1]

Why it matters. Watch whether the agency names what actually made the children ill; every review so far has blamed broken routines in general, and a named organism or a named supplier would be the first thing anyone outside the agency could check.

China's agriculture ministry published a plan on Monday to change how money reaches farming, with a target date of 2030. [2] It tells banks to lend more to counties that grow grain and seed, expands crop insurance to cover the full cost of growing rice, wheat, corn and soybeans, and lets local governments spend bond proceeds on rural roads and services. [2] It also invites private investors in through rural funds, share listings and property trusts that own infrastructure. [2] China's agriculture ministry gave no total figure for any of it. [2]

Why it matters. China feeds about a fifth of the world's people, so anything that changes what its farmers plant moves grain prices everywhere. This is a plan about lending and insurance rather than about land: the state is setting the terms on which other people's money reaches a field.

On 22 August a blogger posted video of truckers in Kangbao, a county a few hours' drive north-west of the city of Beijing, dipping cabbages in formaldehyde. [3] The chemical keeps the pale green leaves looking fresh through summer heat on a long journey, and it can also cause cancer. [3] After national anger, Chinese authorities set up checkpoints to test cabbages leaving the county, and three people have been detained on criminal charges. [3] Singapore and South Korea have stepped up inspections of Chinese cabbage imports. [3]

Why it matters. The problem was found by someone with a phone rather than by an inspection system, and the checkpoints were built afterwards. Two importing countries have now decided they cannot rely on the checks at the Chinese end.

The Food and Agriculture Organization, the UN's food agency, published The State of Agricultural Commodity Markets 2026 on Monday. [7] Trade in food and farm goods grew fivefold between 2000 and 2024, and poorer countries are now far more tied into world markets. [7] The report asks what happens when a shock hits that web - weather, war, disease or a financial crash. [7] FAO economists George Rapsomanikis and Andrea Zimmermann say markets usually settle again quickly, but the price spikes in between land hardest where people spend most of their income on food. [8]

Why it matters. A country that buys a third of its food abroad can be hurt by a drought on another continent, and this report is an attempt to count how often that happens. It landed on the same day China published its own plan to insure itself against exactly that.

President Trump put 50% tariffs on honey and hundreds of other Canadian goods after trade talks between the two countries collapsed on 21 August. [4] Alberta produces 40% of Canada's honey, and its beekeepers were already having a bad year: the heaviest rain in over a century kept worker bees inside the hive for much of the summer. [4] Canada plans to answer from Tuesday with tariffs of up to 50% on hundreds of American goods. [4] Honey is small, about $175m last year, but its 16,300 beekeepers rent hives out to pollinate alfalfa, clover and canola. [4]

Why it matters. Mike deJong keeps 20,000 hives in central Alberta and buys his steel drums, boxes and machinery from American suppliers, so he is taxed on what he sells and on what he needs in order to sell it. The pollination those hives do is priced into a canola crop worth billions.

Prime Line Distributors of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and Ferrarini USA of Hoboken, New Jersey, are recalling about 1,513 pounds of dry-cured pork jowl sold as guanciale. [6] The meat was made at a plant in Italy on 21 May and imported during July, and a sample tested positive for Listeria monocytogenes during routine re-inspection at the border. [6] No illnesses have been reported. [6] The Ferrarini products went to distributors and food-service kitchens in eight states, and the US Food Safety and Inspection Service says some may still be in restaurant and shop fridges and freezers. [6]

Why it matters. This is what a check that runs on a schedule looks like: nobody complained, nobody was ill, and a routine test on imported meat found it anyway. Listeria is most dangerous to older people, people with weak immune systems, and pregnant women and their newborns.

The US Department of Agriculture designated 11 New Jersey counties as natural disaster areas because of a drought that began on 9 June 2026 and has not ended. [5] Hunterdon, Morris, Somerset and Union are the primary counties; seven more New Jersey counties qualify because they touch one of those four, along with Richmond county in New York and Bucks county in Pennsylvania. [5] What the designation unlocks is an emergency loan from the Farm Service Agency, which farmers must apply for by 26 April 2027 and then repay. [5]

Why it matters. A designation is a line on a map with a date attached, so a farm just outside it gets nothing while a farm inside it gets the right to borrow. The relief on offer for a lost harvest is debt, which is a different thing from a payment.

The USDA designated five Montana counties - Custer, Fallon, Garfield, Rosebud and Treasure - as natural disaster areas for drought. [9] Because counties that touch a designated one also qualify, the declaration pulls in eleven more Montana counties, three in North Dakota, and Harding county in South Dakota. [9] The USDA headed its own notice after the three North Dakota counties, not the Montana ones. [9] The trigger is the US Drought Monitor's rating: severe for eight straight weeks of the growing season, or worse than severe at least once. [9] Applications close on 26 April 2027. [9]

Why it matters. The same dry summer produces help or no help depending on which side of a county line a field sits, because the Drought Monitor grades counties and not farms. Farmers in the neighbouring counties get in by touching the line rather than by proving a loss.

Koochiching county in northern Minnesota was designated a natural disaster area for drought, with Beltrami, Itasca, Lake of the Woods and St Louis counties qualifying alongside it. [17] The USDA used its fast-track route, which applies when the US Drought Monitor has rated a county severe for eight consecutive weeks in the growing season, or worse than severe at least once during it. [17] Farmers there can apply for emergency loans until 26 April 2027, to replace equipment or livestock, reorganise a farm, or refinance certain debts. [17]

Why it matters. Three separate drought designations landed inside one week, in New Jersey, Montana and Minnesota, places with nothing in common except a dry summer. The federal answer in each case was the same offer of credit.

While three states were being declared drought areas, the USDA opened disaster assistance to farmers in Indiana hit by recent flooding. [18] Richard Fordyce, the department's under secretary for farm production and conservation, pointed producers to several programmes. [18] One is the Livestock Indemnity Program, which pays out when animals die above normal rates, or when a farmer has to sell an injured animal for less than it was worth. [18] Farmers have to report losses and bring documentation to a local USDA service centre to claim. [18]

Why it matters. Too much water and too little produced announcements in the same week from the same agency. The livestock payment is one of the few parts of American farm disaster help that is a payment rather than a loan.

The US Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service widened the quarantine for citrus greening in California, effective immediately. [10] One square mile was added around Santa Paula in Ventura county, covering 151.7 acres of commercial citrus, and ten square miles in Riverside and San Diego counties, covering another 121.5 acres. [10] The trigger was plant samples from residential gardens testing positive for Candidatus Liberibacter asiaticus, the bacterium behind the disease. [10] The federal line matches an intrastate quarantine California's own agriculture department set on 15 July 2026. [10]

Why it matters. Citrus greening has no cure: an infected tree makes bitter, half-green fruit and then dies, which is why the response is a boundary rather than a treatment. The positive samples came from people's gardens, and it is the commercial growers inside the new line who lose the freedom to move fruit.

The USDA expects Nebraska corn to yield 183 bushels an acre this year, down from 194 last year, and soybeans 57 bushels against 65.5. [11] Two thirds of the state is in moderate to exceptional drought. [11] August rain did arrive, but the agronomist Katie Jorgensen, who works with growers in north-eastern Nebraska and western Iowa, says most of it came too late to repair the damage done during pollination and early kernel fill. [11] Dryland yields are tracking at or below average while irrigated ones are slightly above. [11]

Why it matters. A bushel of corn is about 25kg, so 11 bushels an acre across 9.66 million harvested acres is a large amount of grain that will not exist. The gap between dryland and irrigated fields is the plainest measure of what bought water is worth in a dry year.

Successful Farming asked its agronomists in Illinois to sum up August in one word. [12] Phil Krieg, who covers southern Illinois and south-western Indiana, said favourable: the corn got enough moisture for grain fill and there were few storms, so the stalks are still standing. [12] Jared Roskamp, who covers west-central Illinois and much of Missouri, said relief, because August rain broke July's heat at the point when the kernels were filling. [12] Both said July had already taken some yield off the crop. [12]

Why it matters. Grain fill is the few weeks when a corn plant moves sugar into its kernels, so weather in that window sets the size of the harvest more than anything earlier does. Illinois is one of the two largest corn states in the United States, which puts its August into food prices everywhere.

The US Food Safety and Inspection Service is adding a pesticide screening method to its chemistry laboratory guidebook, and it applies to samples arriving on or after 30 September. [13] The method, CLG-PSTG1, uses gas chromatography with tandem mass spectrometry to look for pesticide residues in muscle tissue from beef, pork, poultry, goat and sheep. [13] The same update extended the application deadline for the Strengthening Processing for US Ranchers programme to 30 September 2026. [13]

Why it matters. A residue limit only bites if a laboratory has a test that can find the residue, so the list of chemicals screened for is the rule that matters in practice. Nothing about what is allowed in American meat changed this week; what changed is what gets looked for.

Origin Agritech, a Chinese crop-technology firm listed on Nasdaq in New York, opened a research centre in Kaiyang county, Guiyang, in the south-western province of Guizhou on 31 August. [14] The 8,000-square-metre complex holds a 4,000-square-metre experimental zone, a molecular testing platform and a tissue culture platform. [14] It is run through two entities: a wholly owned biotechnology subsidiary, and a seed joint venture controlled by the state in which Origin holds 25%. [14]

Why it matters. China's drive for food security runs through seed as much as through money, and the ownership split here shows who is leading it: the state holds three quarters of the venture that will breed and sell the seed. Guizhou is mountainous and among China's poorer provinces, and a regional centre is aimed at crops that suit that ground.

Researchers redesigned the DNA landing sites used by a bacterial enzyme called Bxb1, which stitches a chosen piece of DNA into a chosen spot in a genome. [19] One engineered site raised the success rate to 51.9% in human cells and 35.6% in rice cells, more than four times the natural version in rice. [19] In whole rice plants, the method inserted a 5.8-kilobase herbicide-resistance cassette at the target spot, and 24% of the regenerated plants carried it stably. [19] Long-read sequencing found the insertions complete and precise. [19]

Why it matters. Most crop gene editing so far has cut or tweaked genes a plant already has; placing a large new piece of DNA at a chosen address is much harder, and this is a step in it. It is a laboratory result, and no regulator anywhere has been asked to rule on it.

A review in Scientific Reviews argues that yield, drought tolerance and nutritional quality cannot be fixed by editing single genes. [20] Each of them is controlled by many places in the genome at once, and each shifts with the conditions a plant grew in. [20] It sets out five ways to combine CRISPR gene editing with genomic selection, which predicts statistically which seedlings will do well. [20] The authors list the obstacles, starting with how hard it is to prove which genetic difference causes a trait. [20]

Why it matters. Nearly every trait a farmer cares about is the kind this review is about, so much of the promise attached to gene editing depends on whether these two methods can be joined up. It reviews other people's work rather than reporting a new result.

A paper in the Journal of Human Hypertension argues Mexico should adopt a national sodium reduction policy, calling high blood pressure the country's biggest changeable cause of heart disease. [21] Average sodium intake there stays well above World Health Organization advice, and the authors say the main driver is the food on sale rather than individual choices, with ultra-processed food a large part of it. [21] They point to the WHO's SHAKE framework, updated in 2025, which covers monitoring, reformulating recipes, labelling and marketing rules, taxes and education. [21]

Why it matters. The salt in packaged food is decided by the recipe long before anyone reaches for a shaker, which is why reformulation sits on that list at all. This is an argument for a policy, not a report of one being adopted.

A Nature Food paper says disputes over farming, food, health and the environment are holding up change, and that scientists mostly stay out of them. [22] It proposes a framework for researchers to take part alongside farmers, companies and officials, in ways that name the values and interests in the room rather than treating the fight as if it were only about evidence. [22] The authors argue that working through disagreement produces better shared knowledge and less polarisation, and could pull the next generation of food researchers into public work. [22]

Why it matters. Food arguments, over ultra-processed food, gene editing, meat and pesticides, are usually reported as science against the public. The paper's claim is that they are mostly about interests, and that a scientist who says so out loud is more useful than one who stays above it.

Surfactants are the molecules that let oil and water mix, and they hold together everything from ice cream to shampoo; most are made from fossil fuels. [23] Researchers built a pipeline that scores plant proteins for a structure resembling a classic surfactant, combining protein sequences with thermodynamic calculations and machine learning. [23] Sequence features on their own predicted nothing useful. [23] Cutting the adsorbed proteins into blocks did work, and turned up hundreds of plant proteins with the right signature, several of which behaved as predicted in the laboratory. [23]

Why it matters. If plant proteins can do this job, a large part of the chemistry inside processed food and cosmetics could come from crops instead of oil. The finding that sequence alone fails is the useful half, because it explains why earlier searches were so hit and miss.

Cadmium is a toxic metal that builds up in farm soil and stunts crops. [24] Researchers tested a strain of Lactiplantibacillus plantarum, a bacterium common in fermented food, and found it survived cadmium at 100 micromolar and carried genes for binding, storing and pushing out the metal. [24] Onions grown in cadmium lost root and shoot weight; onions given the bacterium recovered weight, took up less cadmium and showed less oxidative damage. [24] The treated plants also kept more of the amino acids that cadmium had stripped out. [24]

Why it matters. Cadmium reaches farm soil through phosphate fertiliser, mining and old industry, and it moves from soil into food with no simple way to take it out again. This is a result on one crop and one bacterial strain under controlled conditions, not a treatment anyone can buy.

Researchers compared hexane extracts of four plants in the nightshade family - sweet pepper, thornapple, tobacco and ashwagandha - against the larvae of two mosquitoes, Culex pipiens and Aedes aegypti. [25] Tobacco and thornapple killed almost all larvae at 1,000 parts per million, and tobacco was strongest against Culex, killing half the larvae at 120 parts per million within 24 hours. [25] Aedes aegypti was harder to kill. [25] The extracts blocked the enzymes larvae use to break down poisons. [25]

Why it matters. Aedes aegypti spreads dengue and yellow fever, Culex pipiens spreads West Nile virus, and both are increasingly resistant to the insecticides in use. These are laboratory concentrations applied to larvae in water, a long way from anything sprayed on a pond.

Chris Mitchell of the consultancy Bramble Intelligence argues food brands will soon have to win over software as well as shoppers, as AI agents begin doing people's grocery shopping. [26] He expects two kinds: retailers' own agents, built to keep customers inside their store and acting as a food concierge that knows a household's size, tastes and allergies, and independent ones acting for the shopper. [26] The prediction sits in Bramble's Tomorrow's Appetites report, which names this as one of three forces reshaping food and drink. [26]

Why it matters. Shelf space is something a brand can pay for; a ranked answer from a shopping agent is not, at least not yet. This is a consultancy's forecast, and the shopping it describes is not how most people buy food today.

Use of the phrase functional beverage across Google, TikTok and Instagram grew 491.8% in a year, according to the trend research firm Spate. [27] Spate reads that as ordinary shoppers picking up an industry term, and as a shift in how drinks get judged: by what they do rather than by what they are. [27] The FoodNavigator podcast reporting the figure goes through which benefits, ingredients and formats are gaining, and how packaging and marketing are changing with them. [27]

Why it matters. A drink sold on what it does is making a health claim, and health claims are the thing food regulators police. The number counts how often people typed a phrase, not how many bottles anyone bought.

A trial in Brazil put 32 adults aged 50 to 80 with high blood pressure into two groups for 12 weeks. [28] Both did walking, jogging and calisthenics for an hour twice a week; one group also got six group sessions of nutrition counselling based on Brazil's dietary guidelines, which stress food quality and cutting ultra-processed food rather than counting calories. [28] The main measure was fasting blood sugar, alongside blood pressure, body composition and fitness. [28]

Why it matters. Thirty-two people is a very small trial, and it is worth reporting because community programmes that combine exercise with food advice are rarely tested at all. Brazil's guidelines are unusual in ranking food by how heavily it has been processed rather than by nutrient.

Dodford Children's Farm near Bromsgrove in Worcestershire, England, will open to the public on 15 and 16 September for Heritage Open Days, a national festival of history and culture. [15] The farm turns 75 this year. [15] Dr Dorothy Beaumont, a school medical officer, started it in 1950 for children living in the crowded, polluted streets of Birmingham. [15] It still takes school groups in term time and families referred by professionals in the holidays, and its manager, Kelly Broadfield, says more of those referrals now come from families with an autistic child. [15]

Why it matters. The farm is not a working farm. It keeps donkeys, goats, sheep, pigs, chickens and rabbits for children who rarely leave a city, and it charges the families almost nothing.

The FAO's Forest and Farm Facility works with the Traditional Healers Assembly in The Gambia, an umbrella body for healers and herbalists that includes traditional birth companions. [16] In 2021 the head chief of Foni Berefet district and the community of Somita allocated the group 1.5 hectares of natural woodland to safeguard medicinal plants. [16] The group has since protected it from intruders and fire, carried out an inventory of the plant species growing there, and written a ten-year management plan. [16] Among the plants used are moringa leaves and locust bean fruit, eaten for their iron. [16]

Why it matters. Medicinal plants are a farm product with no market price and no register, which is usually how a species disappears with nobody recording it. An inventory and a management plan turn a stand of trees into something that can be handed to the next generation of healers.