Second Exeter Food Network Mezze Seminar

You are warmly invited to attend this year’s second Exeter Food Mezze Seminar (a mixed menu of taster talks).

These seminars are designed to allow us to familiarise ourselves with the work of colleagues across the university with shared interests in food, to offer them valuable commentary, and to generate ideas for future collaborations.

The session will be held on Teams (see link below) on Thursday 12th February 2026 from 9:45-11:15.

The speakers, their topics, and brief abstracts appear below. Presentations will be short (7-8 minutes), followed by time for discussion of each.

 

Please do join us online.

Best wishes

 

Harry

Harry G West- Exeter Food Network Lead

 

Prof Ayesha Mukherjee, English and Creative Writing

Literary Geographies of Famine in Early Modern India and Britain

This presentation introduces my current work which interrogates the role played by famines in the ‘production of space’ in Mughal India and early modern Britain. Key periods of famine and dearth run uncannily parallel in the two countries, across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As this was also a nascent moment of exchange between India and Britain, it meant that the earliest English travellers to India, who experienced some of its worst famines, arrived with their own national experiences of food crises. Combining the analysis of English and Indian vernacular literary geographies with English global travel accounts reveals how the latter travellers’ movements negotiated local ecologies in India, and apprehended their resonance with local English experiences of dearth. While the presentation will focus on selected English accounts of travel in India, it is part of a wider project which reads early modern English literary texts in conversation with their multilingual Indian counterparts to recover a cross-culturally informed understanding of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century famine, dearth, and environment. 

 

Dr David Studholme, Biosciences

Applying genomics to infectious disease in food-crop plants

Bacteria and other microbes infect important food crops such as brassicas, bananas, rice and legumes, causing potentially devastating losses. I will give a brief overview of how we use DNA sequencing to study the origins and spread of these pathogens and to aid in the management of plant disease. I will highlight examples such as our genomics-informed revisions of pathogen taxonomy.

 

Dr Aoife Maher, Centre for Rural Policy Research

Scaling up the short fruit and vegetable supply chain in SW England: rethinking marketplace embeddedness with relational agency and de-commoditisation

 Studies of alternative marketplaces which bring challenge to the dominance of the supermarket often point to the embeddedness between consumer and producer as critically important to the success of these often intermediary-free systems. This research explores the relationship between fruit and vegetable growers and intermediaries across 14 marketplaces sourcing from Devon and Cornwall. Findings point to the role played not only by embeddedness, but also by de-commoditisation of produce and the shift of agency towards the producer offered by disruptive marketplace alternatives. This leads us to question how these findings might influence the design of future regional horticultural supply.

 

Dr Maria Eugenia Correa Cano, Environment and Sustainability Institute

The Water-Energy-Food-Environment (WEFE) nexus of agricultural development: two case studies in Andean countries

Increasing food demand has led to significant agricultural expansion, posing enhance global challenges to water, energy and the environment, risking food security in the world. Although many tools have been developed to understand these challenges, most have failed to include biophysical and socio-economic aspects simultaneously. On this talk I will present a modelling toolkit that integrates Water-Energy-Food-Environment nexus and socio-economic aspects, and its application to two case studies in Andean countries.

 

 

 

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