From China to the UK during the pandemic – An interview with Dr Yiqun Gao
January 8, 2021
Dr Yiqun Gao is based at the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences. He is a Newton International Fellow at The Future Food Beacon and we are grateful to him for travelling to the UK to take up his Fellowship on 1st November 2020, right in the middle of the UK’s ongoing Covid-19 pandemic! His brave decision …
Changing commensality during the crisis: the Nottingham Social Eating Network and Covid-19
June 10, 2020
This post is written by Marsha Smith. The Nottingham Social Eating Network and its community food partners in the city mobilised to meet the rising demand for food aid support during the early stages of lockdown. In this post, I reflect on how the values of ‘social eating’ initiatives are being translated into emergent, localised …
The Perfect Storm: Environmentally and Socially Unsustainable Seafood Supply Chains
May 19, 2020
This post is written by Lee Matthews, Lucy McCarthy and Anne Touboulic. Seafood supply chains sustain three billion people nutritionally and also provide 10% of the world’s population with employment, the vast majority of whom are small-scale fisher-people. Seafood provides access to safe protein for many of the world’s most economically marginalised people but these …
Elizabeth David on food and belonging: Keeping house during a lockdown
May 5, 2020
This post is written by Dr Richard Vytniorgu, Impact Research Fellow in the School of Cultures, Languages, and Area Studies. The Challenge of Covid-19 For those of us who can, working from home has become the new normal, squeezing our entire lives into the four walls we call home. Inviting friends and family over for socialising …
Genomic sequencing and Covid-19
April 30, 2020
Deep Seq, the University of Nottingham’s state of the art high-throughput genomics facility, is currently part of the COVID-19 Genomics UK Consortium, mapping the spread of coronavirus. We spoke to Prof Matt Loose and Dr Christopher Moore, about the work, the equipment they use, and how they are adjusting to this new challenge. Tell us …
Global trading: the good, the bad and the essential
April 27, 2020
This post is written by Lucy McCarthy (QUB), Anne Touboulic (University of Nottingham), and Lee Matthews (University of Nottingham). In our last post, we began our journey considering food supply chains in times of pandemic and we touched upon their history. Here, we further consider some of the flaws in our globalised food systems and …
Global food supply chains in times of pandemic
April 7, 2020
This post is written by Anne Touboulic, Lee Matthews, and Lucy McCarthy The public health crisis unfolding before us is unprecedented, unimaginable and catastrophic. It will profoundly impact our values and lifestyles as it exposes the implications of national austerity measures on public services and the precariousness of our globalised production and consumption systems. Food supply chains …
Coronavirus and the food system: a reading list
March 26, 2020
Gardening and growing Growing and gardening while in isolation, by Mark Diacono (Facebook/Telegraph) Land available for allotment use has declined 65% since the 1960s (Institute for Sustainable Food, Sheffield) Food supply chains The UK’s food supply and a call for rational rationing, by Prof Tim Lang (The Conversation) Interview with Tim Lang, by Jay …
