Paper commentary: Agricultural and environmental drivers of variation in the composition of food crops: A scoping review (doi:10.1002/ppp3.70197)
For decades, agricultural success has largely been evaluated based on one key metric: yield. How many calories can we produce? How efficiently can crops be grown, transported, and stored? How can we maximize productivity under increasingly difficult conditions? While those questions are crucial for feeding a growing global population, they’ve come at the expense of the nutritional and biochemical quality of the food itself.
A scoping review recently published in Plants, People, Planet synthesized evidence from 482 studies examining how agricultural management and environmental conditions influence the composition of food crops. The findings highlight a major blind spot in global food systems research and reinforce why organizations like Responsible Innovations are urgently needed.
The review shows that food composition is shaped by a complex interaction of factors including soil conditions, fertilizers, irrigation practices, climate stress, pollution, crop genetics, and farming systems. These upstream drivers influence everything from mineral and protein content to phytochemicals and the accumulation of contaminants like heavy metals. Tomatoes grown in one geographic environment or microclimate may differ substantially from tomatoes grown elsewhere. The same crop variety grown under different climate or soil conditions or different management systems may contain different nutrient profiles and bioactive compounds. Yet our food systems, policies, and even nutrition databases often treat foods as though they are nutritionally fixed. That assumption is becoming increasingly problematic in a rapidly changing world.
The scoping review authors point out that more than one-third of food composition databases worldwide have never been updated, and another 10% have not been updated in over a decade. In many cases, no national food composition tables exist. While food composition data is often outdated or lacking, climate change, environmental degradation, agricultural intensification, and shifting production systems are altering the conditions under which food is produced, which will require even more responsive databases in the future.
Despite this, the review found that relatively little research has examined how atmospheric conditions, including elevated CO₂ and air pollution, affect food quality. Agroecological farming systems and underutilized crops were also dramatically underrepresented in the literature. Such gaps are particularly concerning since these methods and crops are likely to become increasingly important for nutrition security.
Rising atmospheric CO₂ concentrations, for example, have been associated with reductions in zinc, iron, and protein concentrations in some staple crops. The paper cites projections suggesting elevated CO₂ could place an additional 175 million people at risk of zinc deficiency and 122 million more at risk of protein deficiency by 2050.
Moreover, the concentration of our global food supply around a small number of staple crops (primarily rice, wheat, and maize) exacerbates micronutrient deficiencies and reduces dietary diversity. The review highlights how underutilized and locally adapted crops remain vastly understudied despite their potential contributions to resilience, biodiversity, and nutrition.
At Responsible Innovations, we focus on the intersection of agriculture, nutrition, environmental sustainability, and systems thinking. One of the core challenges facing food systems today is that research, policy, and industry often operate in silos: agriculture focuses on productivity, nutrition focuses on dietary intake, environmental science focuses on ecological impacts, and public health focuses on disease outcomes. But food systems don’t operate in silos. Morgan et al.’s review reinforces the need for more integrated approaches that connect upstream agricultural and environmental conditions with downstream human health outcomes. It also highlights the need for better tools, better data, and more interdisciplinary collaboration to understand food quality in a changing climate.
Importantly, the paper calls for broader adoption of “foodomics” approaches, including metabolomics, proteomics, lipidomics, and other advanced methods capable of capturing the enormous biochemical complexity of food. Most research today still focuses on a relatively narrow set of nutrients or contaminants, while thousands of potentially important compounds remain poorly characterized. If we do not understand how environmental stressors, farming practices, and biodiversity influence the full nutritional composition of food, we risk designing food systems that optimize for calories and short-term productivity while overlooking long-term human and planetary health.
So what comes next? First, we must expand research beyond yield alone and prioritize food quality as a central outcome of agricultural systems. Second, we need updated, standardized, and globally representative food composition data that reflects real-world variation across geographies, farming systems, and environmental conditions. Third, we need substantially more research on climate change, agroecology, crop diversity, and underutilized species, especially in regions most vulnerable to nutrition insecurity. And finally, we need better systems-level collaboration across agriculture, nutrition, environmental science, and public health.
Nutrition security in the decades to come will depend not only on producing enough food, but on producing food that remains nutritious, safe, resilient, and environmentally sustainable under rapidly changing conditions. While that challenge is complex, it’s also one of the most important opportunities in global food systems today.