As the human population climbs toward a projected 9 billion by midcentury, plenty of researchers are exploring just how society will be able to feed that many people. But there’s another startling global trend that has received far less attention: most of those people (up to 70 percent) will live in cities.
 
This shift toward urban living, says Yale’s Karen Seto, has already changed humankind’s relationship with food, including how we shop, what we buy, and how much waste is produced. And as urban populations continue to grow, she says, it will exert untold, and to this point poorly understood, pressures on the global food system.
 
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