Scottish Alliance for Food

Written by members of SCAF's Academy of Citizens Team, Sophie Gardiner, Dr Michael Pierre Johnson, and Prof Emilie Combet

SCAF’s Academy of Citizens (AoC) is open to anyone with ties to Scotland who wants to contribute to shaping the future of food. It brings together members of the public, researchers, and practitioners to share perspectives and explore how to co-create research that provides a foundation for a more sustainable, healthy, and equitable food system.

Last year marked the launch of the Academy of Citizens (AoC) Panel, which welcomed 11 members from across Scotland, each bringing their own food-related interests and experiences. Getting to know everyone and exploring where this work might take us has been transformative. 

The first two meetings of the AoC panel explored four broad topic areas: Food Heritage, Food Knowledge & Awareness, Food Security, and Ultra-Processed Foods. Ahead of the third meeting, members ranked these topics and suggested any other topics or sub-topics they felt were important to acknowledge.  

Food Knowledge & Awareness was selected as the leading area of interest, prompting active discussions at the panel's third meeting, defining more specific areas of interest and opportunities for change. 

Panel members considered the prompt: What does positive change look like for you across these topics? and developed six goals in response:

• Creating a shared definition of ‘Food Heritage’ with communities.  
• Enabling young people to make informed food choices via community learning opportunities. 
• Understanding the definitions of ‘Healthy Food’, or ‘Good Food’, from different perspectives. 
• Increasing awareness and understanding of what dignity in the context of food access means through lived experience stories.  
• Gathering, using, and making more visible diverse lived experiences around food-related education and awareness.  
• Understanding how we can influence the government as a panel.  

In the second phase of the panel's life, we will begin drafting the concept note for our first panel-led research project. AoC panellists selected their top three goals which will help the group identify resources (people, places, and projects) to support the early stages of designing the project.

1. Understanding how we can influence the government as a Panel.  
2. Enabling young people to make informed food choices via community learning opportunities.  
3. Increasing awareness and understanding of what dignity in the context of food access means through lived experience stories. 

  

We are very much looking forward to this next phase of panel activity and sharing it with the SCAF network.  

If you are interested in keeping up to date with panel activity and maybe even getting involved in the upcoming panel project, we would love to hear from you!  

You can contact the AoC Panel Team at scaf-aoc@glasgow.ac.uk 

Illustrations by Sophie Gardiner, Glasgow School of Art

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First published: 17 February 2026