Author Archives: Jennifer Smith Maguire

by | October 1, 2019 · 2:18 pm

An opportunity to ‘have their say’? Community engagement in local alcohol decision-making in England

“Street drinking, begging, fighting, urinating, vomiting… and that wasn’t really a late-night economy, that was [an] afternoon.”(Public health practitioner)

There are a range of health and social issues arising from the local alcohol environment with wide-reaching impacts, not just for those doing the drinking. Decisions made at the local government level can influence the availability and accessibility of alcohol, and therefore potentially reduce these types of harm faced by the public. However, there are a range of interests at play within decisions about the alcohol environment. The potential benefits for the local economy, employment and leisure may be offset by the risks of increased crime, anti-social behaviour and disturbance faced by local communities.

Given this potential for harm, how much influence should communities have in decisions affecting the local alcohol environment? And how best to support them to become engaged in decision-making processes? UK licensing legislation recommends that communities should ‘have their say’ in the allocation of licenses to sell alcohol by local government. But what this process looks like in practice, and the extent to which communities can really shape such decisions is unclear. These questions guided our recent study to explore examples of community engagement in local alcohol decision-making – the CELAD study – with a focus on three local authority areas in the North West, South East and Yorkshire & the Humber regions of England.

“And then we started the residents’ association, which was partly prompted by this, what we considered to be an excess of alcohol outlets and some really dumb opening hours.” (Resident of urban area)

Deep frustration with the impacts of decisions being made by local authorities regarding the licensing of premises to sell alcohol has led to some community groups mobilising to take action. Spurred on by suffering the anti-social behaviour, vandalism and noise associated with a proliferation of alcohol outlets and availability of “cheap booze,” some residents started working together to make formal objections against licensed premises and new licence applications. However, navigating the licensing process is no easy matter for the non-expert, and residents talked of the difficulties of wading through complex “legalese,” frequently facing disappointment when their objections were overlooked.

The practitioners and councillors we spoke to also recognise the difficulties with submitting objections within the alcohol licensing process, with its “impenetrable” language and “intimidating” requirements for evidence. This has led to practitioners in one area working with other regional local authorities to develop an online guidance resource for communities wanting to input to the licensing process. Yet, there is still some doubt about the potential for this guidance to really make an impact on communities’ abilities to be engaged. With continuing budget cuts and restructuring in local authorities, practitioners find themselves increasingly stretched in their work, and there is a sense that promoting this licensing guidance and offering support to communities will not be a priority for all.

“Their experience of alcohol harms in their own words.” (from a practitioner presentation on policy consultation process)

Elsewhere, however, practitioners spoke to us about the added value to their work of gathering community members’ voices around local alcohol issues. A public health practitioner described the difficulties she faced with pushing for a new policy to restrict new licences in areas already saturated with alcohol outlets. It wasn’t until she was able to gather the views and experiences of different groups – residents, local business owners, voluntary groups – relating to alcohol harms that she felt there was a compelling enough story to convince councillors to approve this policy. The accounts of the community, alongside other evidence about the extent of alcohol-related harms in these areas, formed a report recommending the introduction of the policy, which was subsequently approved. A councillor remarked that the policy had indeed “come from the community.”

“So that’s when we looked around to see what we could do, we looked that other cities and towns had gone for cumulative impact policies…  We got in touch with licensing and said can we have a cumulative impact policy? – we’ll look into it.” (City centre resident)

Being part of the evidence-gathering process to support the introduction of new policy seems to be a potentially effective way for community members to influence the local alcohol environment. We spoke with a city centre residents’ group frustrated with their unsuccessful attempts to block the opening of late-night off-licences which they felt were contributing to anti-social behaviour. They described looking to see what kinds of policies have been implemented elsewhere to address this issue, and then pushed the licensing team to consider these options. The local authority then set up a task group, including representatives of the residents’ group, to explore policy options for reducing alcohol-related harms in the city centre. Subsequently, a report recommending the introduction of a new policy was produced, including information gathered by the residents’ group on alcohol-related incidents witnessed by other residents and local businesses. The policy proposal is currently under consideration by the local authority.

“It’s only a small number of people who are ever active in this way.” (Public health practitioner)

These accounts reveal opportunities for community groups to get involved in decision-making and potentially help shape their local environments to reduce harms from alcohol. However, a persistent theme among those we spoke to was the challenge of engaging with all of the people who have a right to have their voice heard.  Those with most capacity and already mobilised to be engaged – like the city centre residents’ group – are those best positioned to push their local authority, and to get involved in consultations and influence alcohol decisions. This then leaves behind those with least capacity to be engaged. And while this is a well-recognised issue across many areas of community engagement, it’s especially worrying in relation to the alcohol environment.

We know that people on the lowest incomes face disproportionately high harms from alcohol compared with those better off. So, if mechanisms to engage communities to shape the alcohol environment favour those with more time and resources to be involved, it may worsen the inequalities we already see in relation to alcohol harms. This means that careful work needs to be done to ensure that engagement in alcohol decision-making is equitable and supports the involvement of those who suffer most from the alcohol environment. And while this may be a difficult task given the increasingly stretched capacity of local authorities in times of austerity, it’s a vital step to helping address critical inequalities relating to alcohol.

About the author

Joanna Reynolds is a Lecturer in Sociology in the Department of Psychology, Sociology and Politics.  The CELAD study was led by Joanna in collaboration with colleagues from London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, Lancaster University, and the Universities of Cambridge, Sheffield and Salford.  It was funded by the NIHR School for Public Health Research.

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Filed under alcohol, inequalities & social justice, research

by | September 18, 2019 · 10:49 am

Wine, terroir and doing things differently

Elmar* is an organic winemaker. His winery is about an hour’s drive from Cape Town in South Africa, at the end of a steep, rutted dirt track, which itself branches off from a small unpaved road. I feel as if I’ve left the rest of the world behind as I drive to meet him for our interview. His vineyards—2 hectares of which are planted with cabernet sauvignon vines—are incredibly verdant. He tells me that it’s a radically different scene from when he first bought the farm twenty-five years. Then, the land was denuded, and the soil was “dead;” now, every square inch is teeming with life and the ground feels springy under our feet.

photo of a verdant vineyard

Elmar is a small-scale producer, making only about 8,000 bottles a year of his award-winning wine. Working in alignment with organic methods means he can “feel good” about what he does. However, he tells me:

There’s a flipside to every coin. Your crops go down, you don’t get the same volumes, and I don’t believe the premium that you get on your product balances the reduction in the crops. So, economically, it makes more sense to farm conventionally. 

For many of us, wine is simply a matter of consumption, leisure and pleasure. However, wine is also a livelihood. The costs and benefits that follow from Elmar’s decisions about his production methods inform the daily realities of being able to feed and house his family and pay the bills. So, if conventional methods make “more sense,” why work organically? He says:

Because it’s sustainable. You can carry on doing this. Whereas the other way…the day of reckoning is going to come.

And would he consider scaling up his production to meet the potential demand for his award-winning wines? He answers without hesitation:

No. I am making a living, and there’s absolutely no need to go bigger at all. […] The bigger you go, the more people you need to employ, the more marketing you need to do, the more managers you need. And you know, all of those come with their costs. And in the end, what’s it that you take home?

On two fronts, therefore, Elmar is doing things differently. He uses organic rather than conventional farming practices, and his business orientation runs counter to the usual pursuit of profit, growth and market expansion. Nevertheless, his orientation to wine production is absolutely in line with the established culture of fine wine. As he says:

We’re not making wine that is the same as everybody else’s wine. We’re trying to…express place that’s unique. And the wines that you taste here will not taste like anybody else’s wine.

In the terminology of the wine world, Elmar is talking about expressing the terroir of his wines: the idea of a unique link between the place and culture of production (e.g. soil, climate, topography, heritage) and the resulting wine.

 

Over the past ten years, I have interviewed a range of winemakers in South Africa, France and Australia. Some of them (like Elmar) identify as ‘organic,’ others as ‘biodynamic’ or ‘natural.’ Regardless of their chosen label, they share a focus on making wines with minimal or no chemical and mechanical interventions. This tends to mean making wine from grapes grown without synthetic chemical pesticides or fertilizers and harvested by hand, using wild yeasts and little or no added sulphur. Thus, although the term ‘natural wine’ may be contentious in the wine trade, it nevertheless signals what these winemakers have in common: an attempt to work in concert with nature, in the vineyard and cellar. They also share a focus on making wines that express their place, or terroir. For Elmar, this goes hand-in-hand with working in sustainable ways; for most, sustainability is a happy consequence of their desire to give the purest representation of their unique place through their wines.

 

I discussed what we might learn from ‘natural’ winemakers in a SHU public lecture on Taste, Place and Why They Matter. In that lecture, I suggested how their shared commitment to expressing their terroir—what Amy Trubeck calls the ‘taste of place’—guided them in making wine, but also enabled them to do things differently. In a myriad of ways—including rejecting agro-chemicals, prioritizing lower yields, hand picking, and adapting earlier eras’ (nearly extinct) agricultural techniques—their practices differ sharply from the conventional methods of the global industrial agri-food regime. More so, their commitment to terroir was expressed not just in their wine but also through a long-term commitment to, and collaboration with the land and the vines: an alternative to the conventional quest for dominion over natural resources. The ‘normal’ methods of agri-food production, and dominant view of nature as a resource to be exploited have led to crises of food insecurity, land degradation, toxic agricultural working conditions, and threats to biodiversity. It is therefore critical that we understand how some producers come to adopt alternative methods, and how that might help to pave the way for today’s alternatives to become the environmentally-sustainable conventions of the future.

About the author:

Jennifer Smith Maguire is Professor of Cultural Production and Consumption in Sheffield Business School, Sheffield Hallam University. Her research focuses on the construction of markets, tastes and value, primarily in relation to food and wine.

 

*Elmar is a pseudonym.

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Filed under provenance, representations & discourses, research, sustainability, Uncategorized, wine

by | September 10, 2019 · 5:03 pm

What’s Cooking? September 2019

“What’s Cooking?” is a bi-monthly update on all things related to CHEFS. In this inaugural edition: news of CHEFS members who have been busy presenting at conferences in the UK and abroad, submitting grant applications, running workshops, writing journal papers, and developing research projects and networks.

I’m very pleased to report that there are now tangible outcomes as a result of our fantastic discussions at the June CHEFS café event, regarding how to raise our visibility. Thanks to Jason Ruffell’s design expertise, we now have a logo, promotional postcards, and pop-up banners. Please let me know if you’re in need of the banners for a CHEFS-related event, and/or the postcards to distribute to your networks.

To look forward to: our first research blog will be out shortly, and plans are shaping up for two CHEFS events for the coming year, one focused on the cultures and markets of sparkling wine (November) and one focused on place making, community and brewing (January). Specific dates and details will be circulated in the near future.

Cheers, Jen

Please send your updates (up to 200 words) of what you’re up to for the November “What’s Cooking?” edition (to j.smith1@shu.ac.uk) by the 28th of October. 

Member Updates (in the order they were received!)

Di Dean, Katie Dunn, Pallavi Singh and Wei Chen have submitted an expression of interest to Leverhulme for a project on ‘Intergenerational Attitudes Towards Household Food Waste: A Cross Cultural Perspective.’

CHEFS was well represented at the June CK conference, with presentations from Saloomeh Tabari, David Egan and Helen Egan (The ‘third place’ role of the café in people’s lives: A comparison of the Islamic café to the Western café); Cecile Morris, Peter Schofield and Craig Hirst (Attitudes towards breastfeeding in public); and Jennifer Smith Maguire (Making tastes, making markets: Thinking about the role of cultural intermediaries in building a fine wine consumption culture in China). You can find their presentations on the CHEFS blog site, via the linked titles above.

In addition to a presentation at the CK conference, Jennifer Smith Maguire presented her research on cultural intermediaries and their role in making a fine wine culture in China at the University of Toronto (hosted by the Department of Sociology and the Culinaria Research Centre) and in Hong Kong, at the International Conference on Wine Markets and Cultures of Consumption—Asia’s first academic Asian wine conference. On the back of the Hong Kong conference, she’s been invited to join the International Partners’ Research Network of the UNESCO Chair for Culture and Traditions of Wine (hosted by the University of Burgundy). Working with colleagues from the University of Leicester and University of Wales Trinity Saint David, Jen submitted a £600k+ application to the AHRC in May, for a three country comparative study of agri-food heritage in developing economies; the application was ultimately unsuccessful. Jen is now developing a bid with a colleague at Lancaster University Management School on sustainability, innovation and food/drink SMEs, which will be submitted to the recently launched Research and Capacity Building Grant Scheme of the Society for the Advancement of Management Studies and the British Academy of Management.

Congratulations to John Dunning, who has recently successfully completed the Wine and Spirit Education Trust (WSET) Diploma in Wines and Spirits (DipWSET). This involved over two years of study with extensive theory and blind tasting examinations; there are just over nine thousand people in the world with this qualification.

John Dunning and Jay Idris have been running several workshops with staff at the Oisoi Restaurant Group. The workshops are focused on Customer (Guest) Service and Cultural Awareness. Following the initial success of these sessions, there are plans for further training on service and also wine knowledge. It is intended that, given the wider development of Chinese investment and business in Sheffield (in particular the Sheffield China Town and China UK Business Incubator, CUBI) to extend the sessions to the wider restaurant business community.

Continuing with the engagement with Chinese culture, food and society, John Dunning and Jennifer Smith Maguire are developing a research project focused on the role of wine within cultural gifting practices and norms, looking specifically at the Chinese business community in Sheffield.

Richard Telling hosted a workshop focusing on the Sociology of Family Business at SHU in May. The workshop, delivered in partnership with the Institute of Small Business and Entrepreneurship (ISBE), saw Richard deliver one of the keynotes, which focused on his research on adolescent work within the context of family catering businesses. This research project was also presented at the Council of Hospitality Management Education (CHME) conference at the University of Greenwich and has since been submitted to a peer-reviewed journal in the field of hospitality management. He and co-author, Emma Martin, are currently in the process of making revisions to the paper before resubmitting in September.

Anna Stalmirska attended the 9th Advances in Hospitality and Tourism Marketing and Management Conference (9-12 July 2019), hosted in Portsmouth and organised by the University of Portsmouth and Washington State University, and presented a paper: “Food in destination marketing: the issue of ‘local’”. The conference provided a unique forum for attendees from academia, industry, and other organisations to actively exchange, share, and challenge state-of-the-art research and industrial case studies on hospitality and tourism marketing and management. The conference programme showcased the complexity of tourism marketing and management issues, including health and safety issues in tourism and hospitality; health, medical, and wellness tourism; hospitality and tourism product development; food tourism and food tourism marketing; consumer behaviour in tourism and hospitality settings. Anna’s paper was well received by the audience and inspired questions and debate. She received great feedback and was approached to work on joint future research. She also took the opportunity to visit the beautiful city of Portsmouth and its beautiful harbour!

Joanna Reynolds is part of a new collaboration with members of the Centre for Alcohol Policy Research (CAPR) at La Trobe University, Melbourne.  Established under the new SHU-La Trobe strategic partnership, the collaboration will explore opportunities for shared learning between Australia and the UK around engaging alcohol licensing processes to protect and promote public health.  Joanna will visit La Trobe later this year to co-facilitate a workshop with licensing stakeholders and practitioners and to develop plans with CAPR for a joint programme of research.

Margo Barker and Anna Sorsby recently augmented their cross-cultural dataset on meat attachment with data collection in UK adults and Hong Kong students. These additions extend a study of meat attachment in student cohorts from the UK, Hungary and Nigeria. The data will be used as the basis of an article that explores relationships between meat attachment and willingness to embrace a meat-free diet.

Margo also published a paper, Exploring the relationship between environmental impact and nutrient content of sandwiches and beverages available in cafés in a UK university, in the area of food and sustainability. The study used a combined index of water use and greenhouse gas emissions to assess the sustainability of university canteen food in relation to its nutrient profile.

Norman Dinsdale attended the “Food and Society” International Conference on Culinary Arts and Sciences (ICCAS) at Cardiff Metropolitan University in Wales in June, and presented a paper: “Meeting the Challenges of Care Home Catering for People Living with Dementia: The Sex ‘n’ Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll Generation.” ICCAS was founded in 1993 by the Worshipful Company of Cooks of London as a forum for culinary artists and scientists from academia and industry to present their work and share ideas.  ICCAS is the only international conference that brings together the two sides of the international food industry: food sciences and food services. The Worshipful Company of Cooks of London is one of the oldest and smallest London Livery Companies and can trace its origins back to the 12th century. The Company was initially responsible for controlling all the catering within the City of London, the ‘Square Mile’. The Company’s purpose nowadays is to contribute as effectively as it can to the pursuit of a good society, through supporting the craft of cooking. A conference gala dinner was held at the Park House Restaurant in conjunction with The Clink Charity.  The Clink Charity’s sole aim is to reduce the reoffending rates of ex-offenders by training prisoners and placing graduates into employment in the hospitality and horticulture industries upon release. The charity works in partnership with Her Majesty’s Prison Service to run various projects within prisons: four restaurants, two horticultural garden schemes and a catering scheme. The conference proceedings can be seen here.

Please send your updates (up to 200 words) of what you’re up to for the November “What’s Cooking?” edition (to j.smith1@shu.ac.uk) by the 28th of October. 

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by | June 18, 2019 · 2:42 pm

CHEFS @ Creating Knowledge Conference (17.06.2019)

CHEFS research was well represented at the 2019 Sheffield Hallam Creating Knowledge conference on June 17th 2019, with:

Saloomeh Tabari, David Egan and Helen Egan “The ‘third place’ role of the café in people’s lives: A comparison of the Islamic café to the Western café.” [Tabari CK conference June 2019]

Cecile Morris, Peter Schofield, Craig Hirst “Attitudes towards breastfeeding in public.” [Morris et al CK conference June 2019]

Jennifer Smith Maguire “Making tastes, making markets: Thinking about the role of cultural intermediaries in building a fine wine consumption culture in China.” [Smith Maguire CK conference June 2019]

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by | May 15, 2019 · 8:23 pm

CHEFS Launch Events (15.05.19)

The CHEFS (Culture, Health, Environment, Food and Society) research cluster marked its launch with two events on Wednesday 15 May.

A day-long workshop with colleagues from across SHU faculties identified five thematic areas to capture our shared research interests and expertise:

  • Food + processes of cultural production and representation
  • Food + cultural practices and identities
  • Food + inequality and social stratification
  • Food + institutional setting
  • Food + place, development and sustainability

In addition, we developed a programme of cluster activities for the coming year.

The workshop was followed by a networking event with a wider group of colleagues with food-related interests, at which we shared the outcomes of the workshop, and invited further engagement and contributions.

Thanks to the financial support from the CKIP research clusters fund, the participants, and especial thanks to Ruth Knight, Jason Tompkin and the fabulous specialist facilities team for enhancing our day!

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