Mapping a Growing Field: How Universities Are (and Aren’t) Teaching Food Law and Policy

Around the world, food systems sit at the center of overlapping crises: accelerating climate change, rising rates of diet-related disease, persistent hunger and malnutrition, and widening inequities in who can access healthy, sustainable food. Laws and policies shape every part of that system—what is grown, how it is produced and traded, what ends up on shelves and in landfills, and who goes hungry. Yet there is very little data on how universities are preparing future leaders to grapple with these questions.

A new study by CHLPI’s Faculty Director Emily Broad Leib and co-author Kipper Berven (HLS ’24) takes on that challenge. Their article, Food Law and Policy: An Initial Assessment of an Emerging Academic Field, recently published in the journal Food Security, offers the first global snapshot of food law and policy academic offering in higher education.

Using rankings of top universities in six world regions, the authors analyzed 494 institutions to identify nine types of food law and policy offerings—from individual courses and degree programs to clinics, academic centers, journals, and professional associations. They also examined trends in legal scholarship over the last 30 years, tracking more than a dozen core food-system topics.

The picture that emerges is both encouraging and troubling.

On the one hand, the field is clearly taking shape. The study identified 280 relevant courses at 157 universities—evidence that food law and policy has moved well beyond a handful of experimental offerings. The United States and Canada lead this growth, with the largest number and variety of courses, as well as most of the world’s clinical programs and dedicated academic centers. Europe and Latin America also show meaningful activity, particularly in agricultural law and food systems.

On the other hand, the gaps are stark. More than two-thirds of the universities surveyed offer no identifiable coursework in food law or policy. Many of the countries facing the most acute food insecurity and climate vulnerability are home to top-ranked universities that do not provide formal training in the legal and policy dimensions of food and agriculture. Clinical opportunities—where students apply food law and policy in real-world settings and get hands-on training—are concentrated almost entirely in North America.

The scholarship trend tells a related story. Legal writing on food-related topics has grown nearly ninefold since the early 1990s, with especially rapid growth in areas like food justice, food systems, and food waste. Yet the institutional infrastructure to teach, debate, and apply this emerging body of work remains thin and unevenly distributed.

“This research provided an exciting opportunity to explore the many ways in which global food systems overlap with important environmental and socioeconomic topics that typically receive more direct attention from academic institutions around the world,” Kipper Berven said. “By highlighting the development of academic programs focusing on this important intersectional issue, our hope is that this research can foster collaborative discussions and inform how universities cover these issues in the future.”

Why does this matter? As the authors argue, building expertise in food law and policy is not an academic luxury—it is an essential foundation for responding to some of the most pressing challenges of our time. Universities and governments have a critical opportunity to invest in new courses, degree programs, centers, and hands-on training that can support the next generation of policymakers, advocates, and scholars working to transform the food system.

“Our food system sits at the center of the climate crisis, rising diet-related disease, and persistent food insecurity – yet most of the world’s top universities do not present opportunities for students to study and interrogate the laws and policies that shape it,” Emily Broad Leib said. “This research shows that food law and policy is finally emerging as a serious academic field, but the global infrastructure is far too thin for the scale of the challenges we face. If we want future leaders who can build the food system we need for the future, we must start by teaching them how it works – and how the law can be used to change it.”

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