Last Saturday, my boyfriend Ivo and I went to the Contact day for small organic farmers in the Netherlands and Belgium which was organised for the third year in row. This year’s organisation was in the hands of Applied Plant Research (PPO), DLV an agriculture extension service and Inagro, a Belgian organisation for research and [...]
Archive | October, 2011
Solutions for reducing hunger?
Recently I was watching a discussion between a plant pathologist, an agriculture geneticist and current professor and former high-level FAO official at a science fair back in 2010 (see the link at the bottom of the post). As the presentation framed it, the topic was on how to feed the additional 2 billion people on [...]
New Conference at Cardiff University
Place to Plate: New Connections in Food Research 2 April 2012 Cardiff University This is a conference by and for Ph.D. and early-career researchers studying food. It is inter-disciplinary and welcomes participation and contributions from diverse perspectives. Early-career researchers are invited to share their interpretations of the themes to challenge us to realise new connections between places, [...]
A typical Ukrainian product from Tuscany
Together with other two PhD candidates from Italy and Brazil I was representing University of Pisa and our department (Laboratorio Sismundi) in particular at the Expo Rurale Toscana that took place in Florence. The theme of this event was the rural culture in Tuscany. Basically the park, where the event took place, was divided into [...]
Feeding the world without trashing the planet
An international team of scientists (U.S., Canada, Sweden and Germany) has worked for two years tackling one of the hardest questions related to sustainability and human development: How to feed the planet’s growing population without compromising the environment? The article entitled Solutions for a cultivated planet, now featured in Nature, concludes that although it will [...]
Miscreant Master Chefs
The next time someone tells me that a collaboration or an innovation just isn’t possible, I’m going to refer her to this story of miscreant master chefs. Though I heartily recommend a watch, I’ll summarize the film in a headline: Prison Imports Slow Food Culture. Well, I suppose it’s a bit more complex than that. [...]
How can we make people hungry?
I read this piece on the New York Times about a woman whose financial troubles pushed her to ‘go back to the land’ (well, the New York version that is, a raised-bed-in-the-backyard type of situation. Still there was some soil involved so let’s not ruin the magic and call it land …), grow her own [...]
France sets nutritional standards for school meals
France has just adopted new rules on nutritional quality of food served in school canteens. I came across a video featuring agriculture minister Bruno Le Maire. You can watch it here, but here’s a synopsis for non-French speakers: France has a 3-point plan to guard against the degradation of nutritional standards and food culture in [...]
Local mafia versus local food
While reading the notoriously famous Gomorrah (2006) by Roberto Saviano I came across a fascinating passage in the book on the relation between illegal waste disposal, local underworld and local food. The local mafia of Naples and Campania region, also known as Camorra and its members as camorristi, has obtained large interest of activities in [...]
Government and industry to blame for hunger on the UK high street
There is a great piece in this weekend’s Observer newspaper about growing demand for food charity handouts in the UK. FareShare, the charity that channels the redistribution of surplus to the requirements of food supermarkets and manufacturers, reports a rise in recipients from 29,000 to 35,500 this year. It now channels otherwise unwanted food through [...]
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Toni Massanés: Molt bo, Leah!...
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Dorte Ruge: Hello everybody !
There are still seats availab...
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Leah Ashe: Thanks, Jess. First: Since I know you enjoy a good...
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Henk Renting: Thanks, Jessica and also Maria for your additional...
