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Many current food systems are unsustainable because they cause significant resource depletion and unacceptable environmental impacts. This problem is so severe, it can be argued that the food eaten today is equivalent to a fossil resource. The transition to sustainable food systems will require many changes but of particular importance will be the harnessing of internet technology, in the form of an ‘Internet of Food’, which offers the chance to use global resources more efficiently, to stimulate rural livelihoods, to develop systems for resilience and to facilitate responsible governance by means of computation, communication, education and trade without limits of knowledge and access. A brief analysis of the evidence of resource depletion and environmental impact associated with food production and an outline of the limitations of tools like life cycle assessment, which are used to quantify the impact of food products, indicates that the ability to combine data across the whole system from farm to human will be required in order to design sustainable food systems. Developing an Internet of Food, as a precompetitive platform on which business models can be built, much like the internet as we currently know it, will require agreed vocabularies and ontologies to be able to reason and compute across the vast amounts of data that are becoming available. The ability to compute over large amounts of data will change the way the food system is analysed and understood and will permit a transition to sustainable food systems.

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Energy return on investment (EROI) is a useful physical metric to compare the utility of energy production processes and their development over time. The concept has been extended from its physical, process-based origin to one that describes the societal metabolism. As such, EROI has been used to speculate about the prospects of humanity in a late-fossil and post-fossil civilization. Often, the narrative to emerge around EROI is that in the (near) future, prosperity will be compromised. Here, we take a fresh look at EROI, with a distinction between a physical EROI, which is useful at energy project level, and a societal, or economic, EROI-appropriate at the level of the whole economy. This distinction leads us to conclude that a renewable future is possible. Such a future is essentially unconstrained by the physical EROI and will have an acceptable economic EROI-not much different from that of the past century.