Breaking bread: what’s wrong with wheat?
Bread has been consumed by humans for thousands of years. This event will consider the history and environmental impact of this staple food.
Our expert panel will compare bread from different countries and cultures in terms of ingredients, nutrition, resilience to climate change and sustainable production methods. They’ll ask why so much research is focussed on wheat and whether bread made from other things could be healthier for us and for the planet.
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Our panel:
Dr Alison Bentley, Program Director CIMMYT Global Wheat Program, CGIAR
Alison Bentley is currently the Program Director of the Global Wheat Program at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center at the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research. Previously, as Head of Genetics and Breeding at NIAB, Alison lead a team of more than 40 scientists, working on a range of applied crop science projects. She is currently chair of the UK MonoGram small grain and grasses community and has been involved with the Wheat Initiative, an international partnership of private and public organisations engaged in global wheat research.
Dr Alexa Bellows, Research Fellow for Co-Health Benefits of Sustainable Food Systems, University of Edinburgh
Alexa is a nutritional epidemiologist whose research focuses on improving food systems to be healthier and more sustainable. She is interested in developing metrics for diets and food systems to facilitate policy change. In 2022, She was awarded an IMMANA postdoctoral research fellowship to develop a metric to measure sustainability of food environments and will be piloting the metric in India and Scotland.
Professor Shailaja Fennell, Professor of Regional Transformation and Economic Security in the Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge
Shailaja Fennell's research interests include institutional reform and collective action, food production and rural development; gender norms and gender gaps in development interventions, and provision of public goods and the role of partnerships. She has been lead investigator or co-investigator on several multi-million pound research projects funded by UKRI, ASEAN, UGC-UKIERI and DfID. She was a consultant on inequality and rural development with Oxfam, on evidence-based policy with the World Bank, and was the social science expert on agriculture and gender and an author of the European Report on Development on Fragility in Africa, 2008-09.
Professor Martin Jones, Emeritus George Pitt-Rivers Professor of Archaeological Science, University of Cambridge
Martin Jones works on archaeobotany and archaeogenetics, in the context of the broader archaeology of food. His current research interests include the spread of farming across Asia; food sharing in the Upper Palaeolithic and the development of agrarian societies and their food economies in later prehistory and historic periods.
The event will be chaired by Dr Nadia Radzman, Research Associate, Sainsbury Laboratory, University of Cambridge
Date: Thursday, 16 November, 2023 - 17:30 to 18:30
Event location: online
