Blog

Do you ‘eat to live’ or ‘live to eat’? Our individual relationship with food is complex, often changed by influences such as cost, availability or peer pressure. Our appetite, or the desire for food, is a major stimulus for eating but even this isn’t fixed and changes as we age.

We are pleased that Dr Katy Hayden, Plant Health Officer, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE), can tell us more about a new interactive public exhibit on plant and animal biosecurity at the RBGE. Katy led a project team who were recently awarded SEFARI Gateway Responsive Opportunity Funds (ROF) to create this display. ​

We are delighted that Max Coleman, Science Communicator, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE), can tell us more about our much loved tatties. Max led a project team who were recently awarded SEFARI Gateway Responsive Opportunity Funds (ROF) to create new displays about protecting potatoes, which are now open to the public at RBGE.

We are delighted that Megan Welford, Farming and Land Use Communications Manager, Rural Innovation Support Service (RISS), can tell us about this new service. RISS is getting the right people together to make a difference to rural businesses across Scotland and they’d like even more researchers to help by sharing their expertise.

Working in research we regularly need to focus on the detail, but it is still important to take a step back and look at the bigger picture - so for this year’s Royal Highland Show we decided to use technology to help.

Scotland’s thriving food and drink industry is a major contributor to the economy, worth £14 billion each year. Ambition 2030, the new industry-led strategy, aims to increase the value of the sector in Scotland to £30 billion by 2030.

We are pleased that Professor Ian Toth, Head of the Plant Health Centre, is able to tell us more about this new virtual centre and why working together is crucial for enhancing Scotland's resilience in the face of threats to arable crops, trees, horticulture, and wild plants.

We are pleased that Annemarie Gibson of Circamedia, an Edinburgh-based film and multimedia production company, has provided us with some insights into what excited her whilst learning about SEFARI research and ultimately telling our story on film.

SEFARI is in a unique position to help individual businesses and other partners access publicly funded research to drive innovation and sustainable economic growth in Scotland. Our research on innovation stretches across the food and drink supply chain. We are working in partnership with Scotland Food and Drink, and are delighted their CEO James Withers has agreed to share his perspective.

Recent scholarship suggests that the popular narrative of the Highland clearances, which looms large in Scotland’s cultural identity, is to some extent a late nineteenth and twentieth century myth.  Much of the out-migration, especially in the early phases, seems to have been voluntary, or at least unopposed. However new Scottish Government-funded research suggests that the long history of demographic shrinkage in Scotland’s Highlands and Islands is far from over.