The article addresses food waste (FW) in the retail sector and its impact on the economy, sustainability, food security, and climate. It presents a scoping review that identifies and categorizes 43 studies on interventions to reduce retail FW, sourced from four electronic databases.

The review found 132 interventions across 41 countries, primarily in Europe (73.2%), with supermarkets implementing 86.4% of these initiatives, targeting both consumers (50.8%) and their operations (46.2%). Interventions were classified into seven categories using a food waste hierarchy framework, focusing on preventive measures such as awareness campaigns, price reductions, operational optimizations, legal regulations, and food repurposing through donations. These strategies are promising and warrant further exploration, with about half quantifying their environmental, social, and economic impacts.

The findings emphasize the need for increased research investment in the global South.

Published in the book “Rethinking sustainability in urban areas” Lea Zentgraf contributed to the chapter “Sustainable Interventions to Manage Retail Food Waste in São Paulo and London” along with Ana Maria de Castro, Cézar Luquine Jr., Daniel Conde and Ribka Metaferia by addressing urban social and environmental issues like green space degradation, homelessness, and food waste. The research, part of the ‘Global Research Academy’ program, involved doctoral researchers from the University of São Paulo, Freie Universität Berlin, and King’s College London. The study took place in London, Berlin, and São Paulo, comparing these cities’ unique challenges and drawing recommendations for sustainability. The findings, supervised by Professors Fabio Kon, Sérgio Costa, and Dr. Robert Cowley, are available via the USP repository. The program was supported by international cooperation offices from the participating universities.

Climate movements led by students and the youth worldwide (and in particular, those in richer economies) have been recognized as having a formidable voice and making important contributions towards a more radical societal transformation to face the climate crisis. However, little is said about the contribution of popular sectors, who have been mobilizing for decades and demanding broader structural transformations—with proposals that tackle environmental issues more broadly and the climate crisis in particular—but who are not directly involved in climate politics arenas, such as the United Nations Climate Change conferences. Usually portrayed as vulnerable, as those most affected by climate events, as victims and receivers of adaptation strategies, or, as resilient, rarely do popular sectors appear as agents of transformation. Critical scholars have advocated for understanding the climate crisis as part of multiple crises, including the biodiversity crisis, a crisis of care, and a crisis of democracy. Situating our article within this scholarship, we argue that the scholarly and societal debate on climate change will further benefit from broadening the scope of which social subjects are considered as part of the climate movement. Based on our research with rural popular feminist movements in Brazil, and in particular, the coalition Marcha das Margaridas, we address the following questions: how are their diagnostics of, and proposals to, overcome the climate crisis embedded in their broader project of transformation? Additionally, how does their political identity within class, gender, and rural categories of inequality inform their positions?

While the Covid-19 pandemic demonstrated the vulnerability of the global food system, new resilient repertoires of collective action also showed how to overcome the multiple dimensions of this crisis. Food movements played an important role in creating innovative alternatives for a more just food system. In Germany, the pandemic affected and continues to affect agri-food relations. This article argues that digital communication was an important tool to connect people for purposes beyond sharing food and supporting food-related needs. Social media became a virtual platform for social mobilisation and innovation around food alternatives during and in a (post-) pandemic world. Two relevant actors in the German food mobilisation were the protest campaign Wir haben es satt! and the food movement Slow Food Germany. The work presented here is based on digital ethnographies and an analysis of documents from the period 2020-2022. The analysis focuses on how these two movements dealt with the crisis scenario, in relation to three classic levels of protest and social movement research: (1) actor level; (2) action level; and (3) transformation level. The comparison shows that both movements developed innovative digital and hybrid repertoires of collective action, and fostered coalitions between actors fighting for a socio-ecological transformation of the food system.

The Marcha das Margaridas is a coalition of feminist and women’s movements, agrarian movements, unions, and international organizations that emerged in the year 2000. The process is led by women’s organizations that are part of a confederation of rural workers. Although its initial program included class demands focused on gender for the recognition of women’s work in food production, access to land titles, and labor rights, the Marcha das Margaridas progressively incorporated other issues such as agroecology and food sovereignty. This article addresses three questions: How did food sovereignty enter its agenda? How do they interpret the concept of food sovereignty? How can food sovereignty be understood from a (popular) feminist perspective? Through an analysis of political documents, we identify five main themes in the discourse of the Marcha das Margaridas on food sovereignty: 1) food as a right and common good; 2) state support for women’s food production; 3) the value of non-commercialized food work; 4) environmental recovery through agroecology; 5) violence-free food produced within respectful social relationships.

The intended objective of this article was to analyze the interactions between the political categories ‘rural women workers’ and ‘rural youth workers’ within the National Confederation of Rural Workers, Farmers, and Family Farmers (Contag), highlighting the contributions and tensions generated in union action, especially with the increased participation of ‘young rural women workers’ as a distinct political category in unionism. The research was based on qualitative methodology, with a primary focus on the biographical narratives of three directors of Contag, in addition to institutional documents.

Among the main conclusions is that rural women workers inaugurated a form of action based on three pillars, directed towards the establishment of: i) specific spaces and processes for training and self-organization; ii) measures to expand participation conditions; iii) collective actions of a public nature. Thus, they institutionalized conditions for the emergence of other political categories, intersecting gender, generation, and class. It is from this process that young rural women workers emerge, claiming this political identity and weaving a field of articulation that resonates in unionism, advocating new approaches to issues present in the union agenda and competing for power and visibility on their concerns.