Food systems have been dramatically transitioning over the last fifty years. At a macro-scale, food systems worldwide have shifted from predominantly rural, subsistent systems to more industrialized and consolidated systems [1], paralleling demographic, epidemiological, and nutrition transitions [2]. Urbanization, global trade, and interconnected food supply chains have accompanied these transitions [3], increasing the diversity of food flows worldwide.

While the world churns and food systems sufficiently do their primary job in aggregate—delivering calories to feed 8 billion people—insidious, destabilizing political and civil wars, competition, and fractured geopolitics are showing the fragility of global food systems. We witnessed similar food crises in 1972–76, 1998–2001, 2007–08, 2010–11, and most recently, in 2020–2023 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the Ukraine-Russia war in which food prices and inflation escalated, with severe impacts on low-income countries and resource-constrained households that depend heavily on imported food [4]. These constraints have resulted in a five-year upward trend in the number of people who go to bed hungry (approximately 10% of the world’s population). To make matters worse, 3.1 billion people cannot afford a healthy diet [5] that meets their nutrient needs and is health protective.

Overlaying these compounded crises is something much more insidious: a rapidly changing climate barreling down on us [6] and a slow recovery from a global pandemic that shuttered the world [7]. Weather and climate fluctuations across time scales–from days to centuries–impact food systems. Through anthropogenically driven changes and by increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme events, climate change threatens to intensify the cycle of poverty that disproportionately impacts many vulnerable communities [8]. Extreme events can decimate local and regional food systems by impacting production, transportation, storage, market and food environment access, and the loss and waste of food. These events also put people at significant risk for severe food insecurity, and failing food systems can impact the availability and physical and economic access to safe, diverse, and healthy diets [9].

Governments, the United Nations (UN), and multi and bilateral agencies often meet these calamities with the same sentiments of “never again.” Still, every time the world survives another food price crisis, we are left befuddled, vulnerable, and fragile. In essence, we remain kicking around in the wreck—not taking stock in the past for what should be the future and not gathering sufficient lessons on how to be more resilient and bounce back and better from these shocks.

While there is a whole range of solutions to get us out of this cyclical wreck, one such area is information. Collecting, gathering, curating, and using food and climate data can help illuminate the state of the world and help track progress and where we are falling behind. Data can also help decision-makers make informed, evidence-based, real-time decisions. However, policymakers are often in the dark about how food systems perform under duress, potential near- and long-term risks and trade-offs, and where to intervene and invest. Without data, they are flying blind. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, it remained unclear how the global food system was holding up and who was most impacted by rampant food insecurity due to a lack of real-time data on people’s movements and purchases [10]. Another data gap was during the first year of the Ukraine-Russia war when food price inflation and market speculation made it hard to gather real-time data on food flows and trade [11].

Researchers are working to develop global guidance and better data tools, metrics, and models to unpack some of the most complex food systems science issues. There remain data gaps on how we can better measure how food systems respond to shocks or perform under stress and strain, but we need to monitor what we can with the data we have in hand. FAOSTAT has 20,000 indicators on food and agriculture from over 245 countries and territories, and the formidable database is curated by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Without a monitoring system that shows strengths and weaknesses at the national level, countries attempting to transform their food systems will lose their bearings and lose their way.

One such tool to monitor food system change and performance is The Food Systems Countdown Initiative (FSCI). The FSCI is an interdisciplinary collaboration of 65 scientists representing every world region from 32 organizations—civil society, academia, and the UN that emerged from the 2021 United Nations Food Systems Summit [12]. With 50 indicators bucketed into five thematic areas that capture the holistic nature of food systems, it serves as a monitoring framework the world can track to align decision-makers around critical priorities, incentivize action, hold stakeholders accountable, and enable course corrections of food systems. In its first year of publication, the FSCI shows that no single region has a monopoly on food system successes or challenges [13]. Every country can improve and learn from their neighbors.

The challenges and opportunities for food systems data and science that lay ahead are significant, requiring that high-quality science be translated into policy faster than ever before. At a time when facts are suspect and sometimes disregarded by some political and business leaders (i.e., climate change) [14], data and evidence can help us navigate out of the wreck and chart a positive path toward global food security.