Abstract Modern food supply chains ‐‐ infused with scientific and engineering innovations have made increasingly more affordable accessible. Yet there is growing concern about the long‐term sustainability of our system. Over time, inputs (e.g., water, fertile soil, fossil fuels, chemicals) working resources land, labor) required for industrial production its associated chain structure become sc...

Many different drivers, including productivity, ecosystem size, and disturbance, have been considered to explain natural variation in the length of food chains. Much remains unknown about the role of these various drivers in determining food chain length, and particularly about the mechanisms by which they may operate in terrestrial ecosystems, which have quite different ecological constraints ...

Because the sizes of food portions, especially of fast food, have increased in parallel with rising rates of overweight, health authorities have called on fast-food chains to decrease the sizes of menu items. From 2002 to 2006, we examined responses of fast-food chains to such calls by determining the current sizes of sodas, French fries, and hamburgers at three leading chains and comparing the...

Classical ecological theory has proposed several determinants of food chain length, but the role of metacommunity dynamics has not yet been fully considered. By modelling patchy predator-prey metacommunities with extinction-colonization dynamics, we identify two distinct constraints on food chain length. First, finite colonization rates limit predator occupancy to a subset of prey-occupied site...

Klebanoff and Hastings [A. Klebanoff, A. Hastings, Chaos in three species food chains, Journal of Mathematical Biology 32 (1994) 427–451] detected cases of multiple attractors in continuous food-chains. In this paper we discuss similar phenomena in the discrete food-chains introduced by Lindström [T. Lindström, On the dynamics of discrete food-chains: lowand high-frequency behavior and chaos, J...

Major changes have been occurring almost unnoticed in staple value chains in Asia. The Quiet Revolution in Staple Food Value Chains documents and explains the transformation of value chains moving rice and potatoes between the farm gate and the consumer in Bangladesh, the People’s Republic of China, and India. The changes noted are the rapid rise of supermarkets, modern cold storage facilities,...

Risk and uncertainty are ubiquitous and varied in agri-food supply chains. As environment volatility increases, only having capabilities to manage agri-food supply chain risks may not be enough, resilience factors also need to be integrated into daily operations. This paper undertakes a systematic literature review on risks sources and resilience factors in agri-food supply chains. A five-stage...

Heavy metal metals are non-biodegradable, have a remarkable ability to transfer through food chains and are potentially toxic for organisms.They are introduced tomarine environment via different anthropogenic sources. In this study, the ability of titanium dioxide nano-particle in transfer of Cr, Cu, Pb and Se metal through an aquatic food chain involving Ceratium tripos as the phytoplankton Da...

Purpose. This study assessed the sustainable food procurement of members of the British and Irish Association of Zoos and Aquariums (BIAZA). It also considered the inconsistencies between their animal and human food supply chains, as well as between between their procurement priorities and practices. Design. A quantitative, cross-sectional approach was employed, involving the use of a web-based...