Cultured meat has been presented as an environmentally friendlier option to conventional meat, but due to the limited data, the studies related to its performance are scarce and based on hypothetical production processes. This work provides a short literature review of the published environmental assessments of cultured meat. The main findings of this critical analysis showed that the lack of real data related to cultured meat decreased the level of accuracy of each study. The missing environmental profile of the process itself, including the proliferation and differentiation phases in bioreactors, along with key ingredients such as growth factors and other recombinant proteins, increase the difficulty of achieving reliable conclusions. In order to bridge the highlighted gaps, a complete production system is modelled and analysed from an engineering and life-cycle perspective. Furthermore, an overview of the supply chains of different products used in the process is provided, together with recommendations on how they should be considered in future life-cycle assessments. In essence, this work provides a structured pathway for upcoming consistent environmental assessments in this field, with the objective of setting the basis to understand the potential of cultured meat.

Food wastage is an environmental concern worldwide, particularly regarding households. This study aims to identify household food wasting segments and to assess the relationship between both consumer and food product determinants and the identified segments. Data were collected through a consumer survey of several packaged chicken products (n = 256; 2019) in a retail setting in Belgium. Of the participants, 36% reported never wasting any chicken meat. The average waste percentages were small, 1.1–3.1%, depending on the packaged product, although they were not significantly different between products. Participants with low levels of self-reported chicken waste were significantly older, without children and/or unemployed. Moreover, their households scored better for household routines and skills. They also agreed more to intend not to waste food, experienced a stronger injunctive norm and perceived consumer effectiveness. Additionally, lower chicken product wastage was discovered for households purchasing organic products and products with both a lower food convenience grade and shorter shelf life. Some relationships between household wastage and food product determinants contrast with expectations based on literature. The cause can be that some determinants are more related to food wasting (e.g., when participants buy organic products) than others (e.g., the products’ shelf life).

Dietary health impact modeling often underpins health impact assessments - valuable decision-support tools for public health nutrition. These models depend on epidemiological evidence to quantify associations between dietary risk factors and health outcomes. However, the review and selection of evidence pose remains challenging due to a lack of systematic approaches for risk-outcome pair selection and difficulties extracting harmonized dose-response data from published literature. To address these challenges, this work aimed to 1) update the Nordic Nutrition Recommendations 2023 (NNR2023) epidemiological evidence base and suggest an approach for comparing evidence grading systems, 2) propose a streamlined method to extract non-linear dose-response curves from meta-analyses, and 3) construct an open-access database of the synthesized evidence. The NNR2023 search methodology was replicated, and risk-outcome pairs were selected using modified NNR2023 criteria. Non-linear relationships were estimated by extracting data points with an open-source graph reader and fitting piecewise constant functions. From the selected updated and original NNR2023 evidence, 159 risk-outcome associations were included, of which 51 were non-linear, and around 40% achieved levels of at least mid-range evidence certainty. The provided database and methodology contribute to increased transparency and provide a standard approach to evidence selection and use in dietary health impact modeling.