A farmer harvests rice on a field in Lalitpur, Nepal. REUTERS/Navesh Chitrakar

Guest Commentary – How Clocks Helped Grow Half a Million Tons of Food
65,000 women farmers have been able to grow more than half a million metric tons more food than they had with traditional practices—all because of clocks. The “daily clock” exercise helps men and women talk together about how household burdens are getting divided, and usually shows men that women are doing more work than they are. It’s one of the exercises that communities say helped change their minds about how seriously to treat women farmers.

UK Company Develops Edible Drones to Feed Hungry
For people facing hunger in isolated or dangerous parts of the world, the only thing better than the sight of a drone coming over the horizon laden with supplies may be this: a drone that you can eat. That, at least, is the claim of a British company, which is developing a prototype of an edible drone, parts of whose frame could be made of anything from honeycomb to compressed vegetables.

Un-Sweetened: How a Maryland County Cut Soda Sales without a Soda Tax
A three-year campaign in Howard County, Maryland, aimed at curbing the community's sweet tooth, led to a significant decline in sales of sugary drinks. According to an analysis, the Unsweetened campaign led to a 20% decrease in sales of soda and a 15% decline in fruit drink sales between January 2013 and December 2015. The community-led campaign included TV and outdoor advertising, as well as a social media campaign.

We Could Stop Tons of Food Losses by Scaling These African-Made Low-Tech Cooling Unites
FreshBox is a solar-powered, walk-in cold room that provides retailers with storage facilities to preserve perishable products. Operating for five months, the project offers vendors and farmers refrigeration services for $0.68 a crate per day, providing a hugely necessary service to prevent food and revenue loss.

Obesity Crisis: Is This the Food that is Making Us All Fat?
Oil is now so abundant and cheaply available that most of us use it liberally in our cooking—chucking it in anything from salad dressings to deep fat frying. In fact, vegetable oil, specifically soybean oil and palm oil, are two of the eight ingredients, alongside wheat, rice, maize, sugar, barley and potato, which are now estimated to provide a staggering 85% of the world's calories.