Over the last few years, I have been talking to people about the concept of food citizenships as an alternative to the dominant ways of which we talk about food – that of consumption and all our roles being that either of consumers and producers. Food citizenship seeks to disturb that story for some reasons,…
Category: food
Food Literacy
I gave up eating yoghurt a few years, after a decade or two of overindulgence it – rarely did a day go by without me tucking into a pot of the gloopy loveliness of yoghurt, either over fruit, alongside a curry, mixed with some cereal or just on its own. I broke the habit, and…
Urban Ag and fine dining confessions
From the archive first posted in 2014 I’ve just spent the last 4 days in Utrecht, Holland in a series of meetings and conferences, considering and discussing the development of urban agriculture. Others will be able to offer you fuller reports over the next few weeks, but for the blog post, I want to confess…
Brexit and south-west Regional voting
As the results of the EU Referendum became clear in the early hours of 24th June 2016, a fault line in British society was laid bare and the actions taken by the governing Conservative Party moved to cement those in the following months. Quickly the political parties and the commentariat of the media looked for…
Tap for change: ubiquitous ICT, food and rurality
For the past few years I’ve become increasingly interested in the linkages between ICT, food and rurality. In 2017 I’m part of a team putting together a conference in July about those connections – see the focus below – so if you are interested in taking part get in touch. Matt (Mreed@glos.ac.uk) Link to the…
This Loopy Idea -UKIP, Climate Change and Renewables
This loopy idea that we can cover Britain in ugly disgusting ghastly windmills and that somehow our future energy needs will come from that. (Nigel Farage, Leader of UKIP, quoted in Ward 2013) My latest paper [here or earlier version here] started from a co-incidence. I was driving to work noting the landscape of energy…
Blended not stirred: spirulina vs kale
The title of the recent Guardian articles captures the tension quite well, and then the article misses the interesting points. As Mauro’s blog post illustrates, there has been a careful and thoughtful case made for growing algae as a food source in cities. But before turning to that let’s consider the value of kale. As…
Going Digital
Recently I was reflecting on why a speaker was making a point that was clearly not supported by the new data, and I realised that it was because they weren’t party to the discussions that happen in the CCRI kitchen. There is always a lag between what is known in a research institute and…
The Internet is (not) a commons
I’ve been engaged in that periodic negotiation with the sheer complexity of the internet – choosing a smartphone plan. Fortunately, I could make it marginally easier as I didn’t want to change the actual phone, just work out which of the galaxy of possible plans I wanted. It is at this point that the rhetoric…
Reading Food Journalism
Over the years I’ve read a lot of food journalism, some good, some bad, some best forgotten. Some of it makes what for me is a fundamental error in confusing purchasing behaviour with support.
The Ruralist 