Princeton’s research on food can be defined by a central question: How do you feed a growing world population without increasing greenhouse gas emissions, fueling biodiversity loss and deforestation, or deepening inequality and poverty? The University’s distinctive approach to studying food from a broad environmental perspective views agriculture as inseparable from many other aspects of human and planetary health.

From early research that quantified the ecological costs of expanding palm oil agriculture into wild habitats to more recent work on managing the environmental footprint of cities’ food systems, Princeton’s approach to studying food has provided planners, policymakers, farmers and scientists with valuable insights into how to steward the planet’s natural resources.

With the number of people on Earth expected to surpass 9 billion people by 2050, it is increasingly critical to find strategies to increase food production without destroying the planet. Princeton’s cross-cutting and interdisciplinary approach to studying food will be key to finding the right solutions in the coming decades.