Food Research Collaboration

Food Thinkers | Trust is a must: Food policy in an age of doubt
2018-03-21 17:30 - 19:30 UTC | City, University of London, Northampton Square, London, EC1V 0HB, United Kingdom
Trust is a must: Food policy in an age of doubt

With Professor John Coveney, Flinders University
Chaired by Professor Martin Caraher, City, University of London
The Centre for Food Policy’s monthly Food Thinkers series aims to advance the thinking and practice of integrated approaches to food policy. For this March 2018 Food Thinkers we are honoured to have with us, John Coveney, Professor of Global Food, Culture and Health at Flinders University, Adelaide, South Australia, discussing consumer trust in food and food systems.

Consumer trust in food and food systems is crucial for health and wellbeing of individuals and communities. Breaches of consumer food trust can be damaging to the credibility of food regulators, impacting also on the productivity of food producers, manufacturers and retailers.
Researchers at Flinders University (South Australia), City University (UK) and University of Kent (UK) over the past 5 years have worked together on an Australian Research Council grant to compare and contrast ways that food trust is damaged. Of particular interested was how trust can be repaired after a food scandal or food scare. Using consensus-testing processes with experts in their respective fields, the researchers sought to arrive at best practice models to assist government, industry, consumer groups and media to (re)build trust during times of doubt about the integrity of the food system.
Professor Coveney will present this research and findings after which questions and discussion will be opened to the audience.
Professor John Coveney PhD, APD
John Coveney is Professor of Global Food, Culture and Health at Flinders University, Adelaide, South Australia. He has research and education interests in food policy; public health nutrition; history of food and health; and social and cultural factors that influence food trust, food patterns and food intake. He is an Honorary Research Fellow at City University, UK.

April 25 | The 2018 City Food Policy Symposium - Connecting people with food policy
2018-04-25 09:30 - 17:00 | City, University of London, Northampton Square, London, EC1V 0HB, United Kingdom
The aim of the 2018 City Food Policy Symposium is to learn more about how gathering and translating evidence of lived experience of food-related problems can help make food policy more effective in delivering its goals. It will explore how gathering evidence of lived experiences of food challenges – how citizens and communities experience, explain and respond to them – can inform more effective, equitable and empowering policy solutions.
The morning session will include short “taster” presentations by policy makers, academics and NGOs concerned with different aspects of food, of examples where they have listened to people and where they have involved them in defining problems or crafting solutions.
The afternoon session will be made up of 2.5-3 hour workshops led by the policy, NGOs, programme and academic community. They will be designed to provide learning opportunities for how to gather and translate the evidence of lived experience. A cross-cutting theme for all the workshops will be processes through which the evidence gathered of lived experience can be used to meaningfully improve decision-making.
The output of the symposium will be a report bringing together a shared understanding of the value of gathering evidence of lived experiences and how this evidence can be most effectively translated into transformative action.
This event is generously supported by the Worshipful Company of Cooks.

Symposium Programme (may be subject to amends)
The event will be chaired by Professor Corinna Hawkes, Director, Centre for Food Policy at City, University of London

9.30am – 10am Registration and coffee

10am – 10.20am Scene Setting: The spectrum of lived experience from listening to co-creation (speaker TBC)

10.20am – 11.20am Session One: Short talks on how do we listen, what do we learn
Focus groups for advocacy: listening to the experience of diet-related noncommunicable diseases in Mexico
Cristina Parsons Perez, Capacity Development Director, NCD Alliance, Geneva
Engaging with consumers to inform policy: listening to the publics views on food systems in the UK
Michelle Patel, Head of Social Science, Food Standards Agency, UK
Assessing vulnerability and risk for intervention design in diabetes: insights from research in Houston, Mexico City, Vancouver and other global cities.
Dr Anna-Maria Volkmann, University College London and Director of Research and Training, Cities Changing Diabetes Programme
Engaging Canadians to inform a national food policy: ways of listening to thousands
Raphael Sauve, Agriculture and Agrifoods Canada; Dr Hasan Hutchinson, Director General of Nutritional Policy and Programs, Health Canada; and Diana Bronson, Executive Director, Food Secure Canada (by video)
Interviewing young people for research: listening to teenagers voices on what influences food purchases in and out of schools in Scotland and England.
Professor Wendy Wills, Professor of Food and Public Health, University of Hertfordshire, UK
“Listening posts” to inform activism and policy in development: the experience of high food prices in Asia, Latin America and Africa
Dr Alexandra Wanjiku Kelbert, Researcher, Life in a Time of Food Price Volatility

11.20am – 11.40am Coffee break

11.40am – 12.40pm Session Two: Short talks on involving and empowering people with lived experiences
Lessons from Witnesses to Hunger: how to disrupt the status quo through action research and photovoice in the United States.
Tianna Gaines-Turner, Witness to Hunger and Professor Mariana Chilton, Professor, Health Management and Policy Director, Center for Hunger-Free Communities, School of Public Health, Drexel University, Philadelphia, USA (by video)
Learning lessons from the experience of food poverty: a Systems Leadership approach to creating food wealth in Cornwall.
Matthew Thompson, Chief Executive, Fifteen-Cornwall
Deliberative processes for analysing research findings: involving small farmers in transforming food systems in Nicaragua and the UK
Elise Wach, Research Advisor, Institute of Development Studies, Brighton, UK; Doctoral Researcher, Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience, Coventry University, UK
Co-designing user-centered services: involving older people in the UK’s Food for Life programme
Francesca Sanders, Head of Service Design, Food for Life, UK
Group model building for local solutions: involving communities in obesity prevention in rural Australia
Janette Lowe, Executive Officer, Southern Grampians Glenelg Primary Care Partnership, Victoria, Australia (by video)
Food Diaries as citizen-generated evidence: bottom up advocacy for dietary diversity in Western Uganda
Representative of Kabarole Research and Resource Centre (KRC), Uganda, on behalf of the Sustainable Diets For All programme, International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) HIVOS and KRC

12.40pm – 2pm Lunch

2pm – 5pm Workshops
The 2.5-3 hour workshops will run in parallel and be led by members of the policy, NGOs, programme and academic community. They will be designed to provide learning opportunities for how to gather and translate the evidence of lived experience. A cross-cutting theme for all the workshops will be processes through which the evidence gathered of lived experience can be used to meaningfully improve decision-making.

Workshop One – Empowering people in food poverty
Led by Ben Pearson, Food Power; Empowerment Programme Officer, Church Action on Poverty; Workstream Leader ‘Involving Experts by Experience’, plus a Food Power pilot participant.
Workshop capacity: 30
This workshop will be used to inform the Food Power programme, a programme which tackles food poverty through people-powered change. The aim will be to identify how the experiences of people in food poverty can be used to inform more effective decisions about programme and policies designed to address it.
Facilitated by the leader of the Food Power workstream on ‘Involving Experts by Experience’, it will start with a general introduction to Food Power, followed by interactive activity designed to reveal the purpose of involving experts by experience, exploring empowerment & influence. It will then showcase & provide an opportunity to test the three different methods that are to be used in the Food Power ‘Involving Experts by Experience’ pilots. This will be followed by a discussion about how the information captured can be used to influence decision-making by programme and policy makers, and what these decision-makers needs are.
This Workshop will provide insights to anyone concerned with effective and sustainable solutions to food poverty. It will be particularly relevant to programme and policy makers at the local level looking to inform their food poverty activities through evidence of lived experience. Decision-makers who would like to feedback and inform the Food Power programme are particularly welcome.
Workshop Two – Better everyday takeaway
Led by Chris Holmes, MD, Shift
Workshop capacity: 15
Shift, a leading product design charity, have been working on fast food’s role in unhealthy weight gain. They are about to start market testing a new social venture to reduce calories in inner city fast food. This co-creation workshop will give you direct experience, as a participant, of the co-creation phase they’ve just completed and put this step into the context of the overall process of product and service design they follow. The content is ‘hot of the press’ and the process is live and ongoing. You won’t get closer to such a programme without being in the programme team but in return expect to work hard for 3-hours and come away exhausted – not for those who want a relaxed afternoon of presentations.
The workshop is for those interested in: people’s relationship with fast food; experiencing a co-creation technique; and product/ service design. You will come away with an overview of a product design process, first hand experience of one stage and some of the most up to date understanding of people’s lived experience of fast food.

Workshop Three – Trust in the food system
Led by Michelle Patel, Head of Social Science, Food Standards Agency
Workshop capacity: 30
The FSA’s strategic aim is “Food we can trust”. However, current discourse suggests that worldwide, trust in government, NGOs, business, and media has declined. Some commentators blame this ‘crisis of trust’ on the rise of social media and the democratisation of information. The FSA has been researching the trust and connection that people have in the food system, and what a) the regulator and b) the food industry can learn to maintain, improve and deserve the confidence of the communities we serve.
This workshop is one of a series with industry and civil society where we would like to briefly present the insights gained so far from three years of research into people’s lived experiences and gather views on what drives and builds a trusted a) regulator and b) a trustworthy food system in an increasingly complex world.
It is part of a programme of work to explore the issue in more depth, including establishing new quantitative measures to understand and track public views including the development of a composite measure for trust, a literature review covering the contemporary drivers and barriers to trust in industry, the food system and in regulators and qualitative research which will explore trust with citizens.
This workshop will be of particular interest to those who seek to understand or represent food businesses and consumers of food.
This programme will be brought together later this year in a peer-reviewed synthesis with existing research from the FSA and elsewhere, intended to help locate food policy decisions in England, Wales and Northern Ireland in the coming years and to inform the wider discourse.

Workshop Four – Engaging in Brexit: How can we meaningfully involve the British public in developing a fairer vision for food and farming in post-Brexit UK
Led by Lynne Davis, RSA Food Farming and Countryside Commission, Sinead Fenton, Food Research Collaboration, Centre for Food Policy. City, University of London and Rosalind Sharpe, Centre for Food Policy, City, University of London
Workshop capacity: 30 people
The RSA Food Farming and Countryside Commission launched in November 2017 with the aim of building a widely shared public mandate for the future of food, farming and the countryside in post-Brexit UK. This workshop will help inform our year long program of national engagement with citizens and practitioners in food, farming and countryside issues.
In June 2016 the British public was formally consulted on EU membership – arguably a simplistic gesture of public engagement with very little follow-up opportunity in shaping the future of this country. So what does it mean to meaningfully involve citizens and stakeholders in the decisions that will shape their future?
Jointly facilitated by the RSA Food Farming and Countryside Commission, the Food Research Collaboration and the Centre for Food Policy, this highly participatory workshop will delve into the nature of engagement in food and farming issues. We’ll start by taking stock of the current landscape of engagement, looking at the processes that have gone into existing consultation and policy proposals across the sector. We’ll then draw on the collective experience of participants to explore method and practice through a lens of meaning and efficacy. We’ll mix presentations, multimedia, discussions, problem solving and post-it notes in this creative and collaborative session. From the workshop we’ll build a toolkit based on our collective experiences.
This workshop will provide insights to anyone concerned about how to take the opportunity of Brexit to improve food policy. It is for anyone that has ideas or experience in working with individuals and groups to gather ideas, ask opinions, consult on proposals or deliberate on democracy.

Workshop Five – Co-production: guidelines for respectful collaboration between people with lived experience and campaigners/researchers
Led by Caroline Mockford, Food Justice Campaigner, and Pete Ritchie, Director, Nourish Scotland
Workshop capacity: 25
This workshop will be used to inform the discourse in the food justice movement in the UK and more broadly. The aim is to stimulate thinking and reflection on the complexities of co-production in the food justice movement.
At the start of the workshop, the co-presenters will talk about their experience of co-production, especially on the food justice agenda. We will also draw more generally on the practice of collaboration in the pursuit of social change between researchers, campaigners and people directly affected by injustice.
The themes raised will include:

Representation of lived experience: how researchers and campaigners can add weight to people’s experience without taking over, or making people look like victims.
Representativeness: how individual experience turns into collective experience through people finding a way to understand what’s going on. How to deal with claims that ‘expert users’ are not representative.
Power: how setting up ‘of’ organisations can empower people in their relationships with ‘for’ organisations; the particular challenges of developing and nurturing strong ‘of’ organisations around food justice issues, and comparisons with other social movements.
Bread and butter issues: the way meetings are organized and managed; how money gets shared. Examples of best practice and the not so good.

The workshop will then open for a guided discussion
The workshop will provide insights for those of us who are researchers and campaigners and see our work benefiting others. It will remind us of how we can engage coherently and respectfully with those whose experiences we rely on for our work. For those of us who come to the workshop as people with lived experience it will provide an opportunity to share experience of collaboration and remind us what we have a right to expect.
Further workshops will be announced shortly, examples include:
– Visual methods for gathering evidence of lived experience (led by Universidad de Alcalá, Madrid)
– Systems leadership and food (led by the Leadership Centre)
Each workshop with have a capacity of between 15-30 people and workshop signup will be circulated in March.

Agri-sustainability in a Changing Political Clime
2018-05-14 10:00 - 2018-05-15 14:00 | Sustainable Places Research Institute, Cardiff University, School of Law and Politics, Cardiff University Law Building, Museum Avenue,, Cardiff, CF10 3AX
Centre of Law & Society Workshop
Agri-sustainability in a Changing Political Clime
Monday 14th May 2018, 10 a.m. until 6 p.m.
Tuesday 15th May 2018, 9.15 a.m. until 2 p.m.
Join us for this two-day workshop to discuss the future of agriculture in our societies, with keynote speeches from Prof. Joseph McMahon, University College Dublin and Mr. Matthew Quinn, Distinguished Visiting Fellow, Sustainable Places Research Institute, Cardiff University.
This workshop addresses the challenges and opportunities for Agricultural Sustainability bearing in mind on-going political upheavals, including Brexit. It will consider how we can ensure a sustainable future for farming in our societies, approaching this from an interdisciplinary perspective with speakers from diverse backgrounds. The workshop will focus on three main themes: 1) (dis)integrated unions; 2) agri-sustainability and new technologies; 3) an integrated and holistic approach to the food chain.
Confirmed speakers include:

Pablo Amat-Llombart, University of Valencia
Michael Cardwell, University of Leeds
Janet Dwyer, University of Gloucester
Sue Evans, Games and Wildlife Conservation Trust
Thomas Lancaster, RSPB
Joseph McMahon, University College Dublin (keynote)
Hans-Wilhelm Nuetzmann, University of Bath
Matthew Quinn, Cardiff University (keynote)
Susana Carro-Ripalda, University of Deusto
Marie Schwoob, IDDRI
Huw Thomas, NFU Cymru
Kelly Thornber, University of Exeter

Registration is free but places are limited, so be sure to book early.
Please click here for the event flyer in English or here for the event flyer in Welsh.
For detailed programme, please click here.
Queries can be sent to the workshop organisers, Dr. Ludivine Petetin (PetetinL@cardiff.ac.uk) or Dr. Mary Dobbs (m.dobbs@qub.ac.uk).
If you have any dietary requirements, please let us know when booking.

Food Thinkers - What are the research gaps that need to be filled to help public-private action be more effective in promoting nutrition?
2018-06-27 16:30 - 18:30 | Centre for Food Policy, City, University of London. Northampton Square, London, Select state..., EC1V 0HB, United Kingdom
What are the research gaps that need to be filled to help public-private action be more effective in promoting nutrition?
With guest speaker:
Lawrence Haddad,
Executive Director, Global Alliance for Improving Nutrition (GAIN)
Taking place on Wednesday 27 June at the slightly earlier time of 4.30pm
B200, University Building, City, University of London
Many food system stakeholders from public and private sectors think that they should be doing more and better work together to make the food system deliver more affordable and available nutritious food for all.
What are the knowledge and evidence gaps that are holding us back from doing this and are they researchable?
This presentation will explore potential areas where more and better public-private engagements can advance nutrition, ask what is holding back these engagements and what research can do to inform and facilitate them and make them more likely to deliver.
Questions and discussion will then be opened to the audience.
The seminar is free to attend, tickets are allocated on a first come first served basis so please do register here to secure your space. Please also feel free to forward this invitation onto colleagues.

Public health as a ‘public good’ from agriculture. How can we win support for this principle from UK policy makers?
2018-07-11 14:00 - 17:00 | Food Research Collaboration, City, University of London. Northampton Square, London, EC1V 0HB, United Kingdom
Half-day seminar, 2pm-5pm, Wednesday 11th July 2018, at City, University of London

According to the Defra consultation document Health and Harmony, the rubric of ‘Public money for public goods’ will be the ‘cornerstone’ of agriculture policy after the UK leaves the EU. The Food Research Collaboration at the Centre for Food Policy at City, University London, is working with the Sustain food and farming alliance and the Royal Society for Public Health to explore the grounds for including public health as one of the public goods that should be supported under the new UK Agriculture Act, as well as being cited as a ‘purpose’ of the Act. Support might include increased fruit and vegetable production and reduced sugar production; safer and better jobs in food and farming; and whole-farm approaches to integrated health and sustainability, for example.
Examples of public goods floated in the Health and Harmony paper include improved soil, water and air quality, public access to nature, ‘enhanced beauty’ and bee health. Human health, however, is not included except as an indirect benefit of clean air and water, access to green space and controlled use of farm antibiotics and pesticides.
Explicit integration of public health seems a serious omission, given that the self-evident primary purpose of agriculture is to provide the food necessary for health; and that agricultural policy has enormous potential either to support or undermine public health, with significant related benefits or costs to human well-being and the economy. Indeed, Defra Secretary of State Michael Gove has himself stated this in recent speeches. It may also be the case that if public health is not asserted now as a valid criterion in deciding which purposes agricultural policy should support, it risks being ‘defined out’ of future debate. This will inevitably jeopardise efforts to achieve more coherent farming, food and health policy.
This half-day seminar will examine the question: ‘Public health as a ‘public good’ from agriculture: How can we win support for this principle from UK policy makers?’ The seminar will be highly collaborative, with attendees encouraged to take an active part. We aim to develop and publish a rationale for including public health front-and-centre among the public goods to be supported by the new UK Agriculture Act. We believe this would be a significant step for integrated public policy.
RSVP to: Lindy Sharpe, Food Research Collaboration: contact@foodresearch.org.uk

Seminar convened by Lindy Sharpe, Food Research Collaboration; Kath Dalmeny and Vicki Hird of Sustain; and Shirley Cramer, Royal Society for Public Health. Kath and Shirley are also commissioners for the RSA’s Food, Farming and Countryside Commission and this seminar will inform their response to this and other processes.

IFSTAL Showcase - Food for thought
2018-07-12 10:00 - 16:00 | IFSTAL, Oxford Town Hall, Oxford, OX1 1BX, United Kingdom
IFSTAL SHOWCASE
‘FOOD FOR THOUGHT’
12th July 2018, 10am-4pm at the Oxford Town Hall

IFSTAL is unique. It brings together academic minds in food systems thinking with the workplace to create an inter-disciplinary, workplace-orientated model to build the community of future researchers, practitioners, campaigners, and advocates for change: ‘food system analysts’.
This showcase event will be an opportunity to share and discuss experiences of a multi-institution collaboration for interdisciplinary teaching and learning. With a focus on the food system, it will highlight IFSTAL activities over the past 3 years as a case study by:

Explaining the motivation for the programme – the challenges of the global food system now and in the future and need to skill up the workplace
Reviewing the method and learning in the programme – the development of the programme, innovative approaches to student engagement, use of the Virtual Learning Environment, and building workplace contacts
Demonstrating workplace pull and the value of our teaching and learning method to the workplace
Reflecting on the value to students and to enhance employability for students in a competitive job market
Celebrating the collaborative approach provided by HEFCE (now the Office for Students), partner institutions and the workplace

Speakers Include:

John Ingram, University of Oxford
Alan Hayes, IGD
Angela Wright, Compassion of World Farming
Helen Munday, FDF
Tim Lang, City, University of London
Lucy Foster, Defra
Matt Jennings, Office for Students

Who should attend?

Higher education under- and post-graduate course directors, educational technologists, career officers, education policy staff;
Food industry – HR managers (CPD), strategy and policy staff;
NGOs – HR managers (CPD), policy and strategy staff;
Government departments – policy and strategy staff;
Funders;
Professional and trade bodies; and
IFSTAL alumni

https://www.oxforduniversitystores.co.uk/product-catalogue/environmental-change-institute/eci-events

Food Thinkers: Preference: the missing ingredient in food policy
2018-09-26 17:30 - 19:00 | City, University of London, Northampton Square, London, EC1V 0HB, United Kingdom
Preference: the missing ingredient in food policy
With Bee Wilson – food writer, journalist and historian
Chaired by Professor Corinna Hawkes, Centre for Food Policy, City, University of London
The Centre for Food Policy’s Food Thinkers series aims to advance the thinking and practice of integrated approaches to food policy.

The likes and dislikes populations have about food – reinforced by habit and mediated by food prices – are one of the greatest reasons anyone eats something. Bee will present some of the mechanisms through which human preferences are formed; and how they can change throughout the human lifespan.
The seminar will consider a few examples of whole populations either changing their food preferences in a healthier direction, encouraged by food policy (Japan) or retaining traditional preferences in the wake of the nutrition transition (South Korea).
Bee will also draw on and share her experience of involvement with a new charity called Flavour School which is using the Sapere method of sensory education pioneered in Scandinavia to help children in the UK develop new and more varied preferences for fruits and vegetables among other foods.
This will be followed by Q&A and discussion with the audience.
Bee Wilson
Bee Wilson is a food writer, journalist and historian. She is the author of several books including First Bite: How We Learn to Eat and Consider the Fork: a history of how we cook and eat. Her next book, due out next year, is about the nutrition transition.
She writes for a wide range of newspapers including The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal and The London Review of Books. She is the chair of Flavour School, a new charity offering a programme of sensory food education to primary school children in the U.K.
