Category Archives: Uncategorized

A merry band of SHUFood-ies and Food and Nutrition Student Champions (all from Sheffield Business School) had a brilliant time on 25 October, 2023, delivering ‘Picturing Good Food.’ The event, part of the 2023 ESRC Festival of Social Science, took place in Sheffield’s Winter Garden. Perfectly timed to coincide with Sheffield schools’ half-term holiday, the event offered four hands-on activities for kids (and parents!) of all ages. Inspired by the range of food-related research we do across our three food research clusters, the activities explored the many different ways in which people ‘think and do’ food, in relation to attitudes to eating, plant-based foods, and food waste.

We were delighted to host a food research event on 18 October 2023, focusing on PGRs and ECRs with research that spanned our cluster domains.

We started with a great talk from SBS PhD Tutor Ellen Bennett on CV building, which included sage advice on finding the right balance between opportunities to get involved and broaden your networks, and other commitments (including your PhD!), well-being, home-life balance, and so on. Ellen also provided helpful sign-posts to who to speak to and ways to get involved.

We then had three research presentations with some lively Q&A, featuring CHEFS visiting PhD student Andrey Sgorla, SWEFS GTA PhD student Ufuoma Arangebi, and SHARe ECR lecturer Jordan Beaumont. Full titles and abstracts below.

Thanks to everyone who joined in!

Andrey Sgorla
Entrepreneurship fermented in the bottle: The artisan brewer: authenticity, passion and connection to the territory
The growth of craft breweries boosts entrepreneurship, values manual work, and strengthens the local economy. The narratives of master brewers highlight the authenticity of the products, the passion for the work, and the production techniques, emphasizing the origin of the ingredients and the connection with their places of production, conferring uniqueness and quality. Consumers’ growing interest in high-quality beers and unique flavors drives beer tourism and integration into gastronomy. The constant search for new flavors drives the brewing sector. The expansion of hop plantations makes it possible to produce exclusive recipes, emphasizing local identity, fostering innovation in production processes, and creating new styles. At the same time, breweries are adopting sustainable practices, considering raw materials, ingredients, energy, packaging, and waste management, with a view to interconnectedness and environmental responsibility.

Ufuoma Arangebi
Intergenerational Cross-Cultural Attitudes Towards Household Food Waste
Food waste has significant social, economic, and environmental implications. The UN has identified curbing waste across the global food supply chain as key to achieving SDG12 which focuses on sustainable food production and consumption. Households are the largest producers, accounting for nearly 50% of the total food waste generated annually, particularly in developed countries. Consequently, understanding attitudes and behaviours towards HFW has become necessary given the significance of curbing food waste in the drive towards global sustainability. This research explores how these attitudes and behaviours towards household food waste are formed through the mechanism of intergenerational transmission and shaped by cultural context by examining the familial food practices of two different cultural settings in Nigerian and British households.

Jordan Beaumont
Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) in those with mild-to-moderate binge eating behaviour
The abundance of food cues in the environment and the wide availability and low cost of energy-dense, palatable foods are leading contributors to the growing levels of obesity in most societies. These foods are associated with a pleasure response, which increases their consumption and potentiates energy dysregulation by overriding homeostatic mechanisms. Individuals who present with binge eating behaviour, characterised by recurrent episodes of excessive consumption, appear to be hyper-responsive to these food cues and the rewarding aspects of food. Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) appears an effective modulator of appetite control in people at risk of overconsumption, however findings are inconsistent. This research aimed to further understand the potential effects of tDCS, and specifically the eating behaviour trait-dependent effect stimulation.

What’s Cooking is an update on all things related to CHEFS: the Culture, Health, Environment, Food and Society research cluster at Sheffield Hallam University. What’s been cooking since our last edition?

The next instalment of our online research talk series is on 9 November, when we’ll have paired papers on the theme of ‘Food, Economic Imaginaries, and Entrepreneurship.’ We’ll be joined by Dr Alessandro Gerosa (University of Birmingham), who will be talking about his research with Italian gourmet food truck operators, and by Dr Jasmina Božić (University of Zagreb), who will be talking about her research with Croatian micro entrepreneurs in organic fruit and vegetable production. Details (including full abstracts and the Zoom joining link) are available on our Online Research Talks page. The online talks are open to all, both local and global, students and staff, practitioners and public. Please feel free to share with your networks—all welcome!

Future talks:

• 7 December for a joint CHEFS talk/Department of Service Sector Management Distinguished Lecture from Dr Maria Touri (University of Leicester) on her collaborative research with farmers in South India and consumer in the UK, using a storytelling experiment to bring farmers’ voices into the food supply chain. Details and joining link here.
• 26 January for Barbara Bray MBE, who will deliver a BTE Talk (for the College of Business, Technology and Engineering) on ‘Consolidating the population, planet and people: Food industry solutions.’ Registration and details here.

Our virtual research roundtables are an informal chance to check in, share updates, trade suggestions, ask questions and bounce ideas around. No prep needed—just a chance to meet up and talk CHEFS for an hour:

• Thursday 17 November, 4-5pm
• Wednesday 14 December, 4-5pm

Research roundtable meeting invites (with Zoom link and meeting password) will be sent out shortly via the CHEFS JISC list. Not joined the JISC list yet? See information on the very bottom of each CHEFS webpage. In the meantime, please email me directly (j.smith1@shu.ac.uk) if you’d like me to forward a meeting invite.

Below, we have:

• updates on recent CHEFS members’ activities (cuisine, wine, and alcohol licensing research activities, plus introductions from two CHEFS-linked GTA PhD students);
• resources/calls for papers/conference announcements (upcoming Sheffield event re. food and social enterprises; CFP on food and communication);
• the usual call for contributions and content for the January 2023 edition of What’s Cooking.

Cheers,
Jen

******************

Recent CHEFS Activities

Joanna Reynolds has recently had a blog published by the Institute of Alcohol Studies, in which she summarises her research on media representations of changes to alcohol licensing during the pandemic in 2020. You can read the blog here and hear Jo talk about the research in a CHEFS paired papers session in March 2022). Jo also recently published the research in Drug & Alcohol Review: ‘Framings of risk and responsibility in newsprint media coverage of alcohol licensing regulations during the COVID-19 pandemic in England.’ The article is open access.

John Dunning has been invited to serve as Academic Board Member for HRC Culinary Academy, Sofia, Bulgaria. This role will allow him to engage with employers in Bulgaria, who are also represented on the Board. John has also recently developed a Wine Tourism, Destination Marketing Management HSE student project that focuses on the Yorkshire Wine Trail (YWT), which will be advertised to students in the Department of Service Sector Management. The HSE project is part of a wider CHEFS focus on regional wine, wineries and wine tourism, which we’ll be showcasing in the spring with an academic/practitioner event focused on English and Welsh wine—a Covid-delayed follow-up to the CHEFS Sparkling Symposium. Watch this space for more details!

Jennifer Smith Maguire, Richard Ocejo (City University of New York), and Michaela DeSoucey (North Caroline State University) have recently published ‘Mobile trust regimes: Modes of attachment in an age of banal omnivorousness’ in the Journal of Consumer Culture. Abstract: The 21st century rise of culturally omnivorous tastes and classifications proffers a new dilemma for how markets create attachments and achieve trust for global consumers. Consumer entities must be both globally circulatable and offer a sense of localized authenticity without compromising either. Drawing from research on market trust and attachment, this article introduces the concept of mobile trust regimes to account for how sets of actors and repertoires attempt to address this tension. Through two case studies from gastronomic industries—food halls and natural wine—we investigate the devices of mobility used to facilitate the global circulation of the local. These include standardized aesthetic and affective templates communicated through physical décor, recurrent narratives, and social media curation. We argue that the concept of mobile trust regimes helps clarify two key issues in contemporary consumer culture: tensions between homogenization and heterogenization and how the symbolic value of omnivorous tastes becomes institutionalized and even banal. The article is open access!

John and Jen are delighted to be working again with Samantha McCormick. Sam is a SHU grad (BSc Hons Nutrition, Diet & Lifestyle) and is working as a research assistant on a Department of Service Sector Management funded project on wine gifting, which has involved interviews with British and Chinese consumers. Sam will be transcribing and coding transcripts. The research builds on an earlier study by John and Jen focused on Chinese expat consumers’ wine gifting attitudes and behaviours, which will appear in the edited Routledge collection Wine and the Gift (editor, Peter Howland).

Jennifer Smith Maguire and Nikita Bridgeman, and co-authors Sharron Marco-Thyse (Centre for Rural Legal Studies, South Africa) and Charles Erasmus (Wine Industry Value Chain Round Table, South Africa) have recently had their article accepted at the Journal of Wine Research. The article, ‘Wine farmworkers, provenance stories and ethical value claims’ reports on a pilot study utilizing storytelling workshops with South African wine farm manual workers, and work carried out as part of Nikita’s dissertation for her MSc in Food Consumer Marketing and Product Development (Sheffield Business School). (More on Nikita, below!). Jen has just submitted a BA/Leverhulme small research grant bid to scale up the project. You can read more about the research in the pilot study findings report and this recent CHEFS blog about the impact portion of the research.

Finally: CHEFS is delighted to welcome two food-focused GTAs to Sheffield Business School!

Nikita Bridgeman is working with supervisors Pallavi Singh and Dianne Dean, on the project, ‘Intergenerational Attitudes Towards Food from a Cross Cultural Perspective.’ It is hoped that the research can contribute to developing culturally appropriate suggestions (which are at present limited) regarding the reduction of food waste, in support of national sustainability objectives. As a previous MSc Food Consumer Marketing and Product Development student at Sheffield Hallam, Nikita is excited to continue her education here at SHU and look forward to getting involved with all the different opportunities the university has to offer. Over the last 9 months, she has been an Associate Lecturer at SHU within the Food and Nutrition, Marketing, and Business Operations and Systems subject groups, and is thrilled to be able to continue teaching alongside studying for her PhD. Outside of work/study, she is a “complete foodie” and explores her passion through food blogging, which has been great fun and provided her with further insights into both the food and marketing industries. She hopes one day to use these experiences to conduct research into the promotion of food in social media/influencer culture. Nikita says: “I’m very excited to be a part of CHEFS and looking forward to seeing where my research takes me!” We’re excited too!

Gareth Roberts is working with supervisors Jennifer Smith Maguire, Mark Norman and Caroline Westwood, on the project, ‘Food events, ‘sustainability imaginaries’ and shaping consumer perceptions and behaviour.’ Gareth is no stranger to working at Sheffield Hallam University. Once upon a time, he pushed a tea trolley around the Stoddart building! Between 2002-04 he completed a Post Compulsory Education and Training PGCE and from 2005-15 he taught in the Events Management team. Gareth is passionate about cooperation, and has worked collaboratively with people from all walks of life for over 25 years. His various experiences as an arts administrator, event manager, lecturer and serial social entrepreneur bring useful skills and resilience to the Sheffield cooperative economy. Gareth is a founder member and co-director of Regather, and established ShefFood – Sheffield’s Food Partnership. Since 2015 he has led strategic developments around Community Economic Development and Sustainable Food Systems, enabling innovative economic and social change in Sheffield. His mission is a food system where money is retained in the local economy, land is more productive, food is better quality, health is improved, and people have involvement in changing the food system for the better.

*****************

Resources/call for papers/conference announcements

A Sustainable Future: Sheffield’s Social Enterprise Exchange Conference, 2022.
In-person event to mark International Social Enterprise Day, offering the chance to connect with others and explore what a sustainable future looks like for you and/or your organisation. The day will include panel discussion, in-depth workshops, lunch and plenty of opportunities for networking. The conference is free and open to anyone working with, in or interested in the social enterprise sector. Information and registration link available here.

Call for papers: Third International Conference on Food and Communication. Deadline 15 February.
The third conference on Food and Communication will be held in Örebro, Sweden, 13 – 15th September 2023, with the theme “Communication ‘good’ foods.” By studying topics at the intersection of communication and food, the conference welcomes scientific contributions covering all geographic areas, historical periods, and methods, including, but not limited to food and: health; sustainability; ethics; science; branding/marketing; media; advice and cookbooks; governmental discourse; corporate discourse; professional communication (chefs, restaurants); politics; religion. Full information and abstract submission point available here.

****

Call for content for the next edition of What’s Cooking

The next edition of What’s Cooking will be January 2023. Please send content (research updates, calls for expression of interest, relevant calls for papers/conference/event announcements) to j.smith1@shu.ac.uk by 4 January.

CHEFS blog

Interested in writing a blog post? These are usually 800-1200 words and written for a general audience in an informal style. Blogs can revisit work you’ve already done (e.g., highlighting a recent output/publication); discuss research or research-related activities (teaching, public engagement, etc.) that you are working on; offer your informed take on contemporary food/drink issues or policy; provide a profile on your research. If you’d like to contribute a piece, please get in touch with Jen (j.smith1@shu.ac.uk).

Want to stay updated? Follow us on Twitter (@SHU_CHEFS), subscribe to the blog and/or join our Jisc email list: see information on the very bottom of each CHEFS webpage.