What Happened This Month | March 2026
Published: 16 April 2026
In March, a bumper series of events at the intersection between heritage foods, the people who study and write about them, and the policy conversations that can amplify research into practice.
SCAF is not only a STEM‑shaped landscape but also a space that recognises how much of food is grounded in the arts, humanities, and lived experience. The month opened with a roundtable on why Scots should rediscover oily fish, hosted by SCAF, the Institute of Aquaculture, ThinkAqua, StartUp Stirling, Forth Valley College, and the University of Glasgow, and held at the University of Stirling. Chaired as a collaborative discussion by SCAF leads Prof Rrachel Norman and Prof Dave Little, the session framed seafood as a central part of a nutritious, low‑carbon food system, and a concrete lever for the new Good Food Nation Plan. Part of Stirling Good Food Fortnight, the tone was pragmatic and ambitious: from discussing the barriers to getting oily fish back into everyday Scottish diets to asking what changes in fashion, procurement, and public knowledge would be needed to shift behaviour, particularly for people on lower incomes. The panellist included Dr Stephanie Horn, Dr Anneli Löfstedt, Prof Stuart Galloway, Prof Emilie Combet, Gareth Davies, Dr Matthew Sprague, Alexandra Pounds, Prof Rachel Norman, and Prof Dave Little. The conversation is now available to watch on YouTube.
On the same axis of heritage and narrative, the World Bannock Day talk on 26 March featured food historian Dr Lindsay Middleton and award‑winning food writer Peter Gilchrist, drawing out the history of Bannocks and of the 1930s Scottish‑food writer Florence Marian McNeill as a way to connect present‑day Scottish food culture with older, sometimes “at‑risk” traditions. The event was a reminder that food history and food policy are not separate tracks, and that SCAF’s work sits at the intersection where research, tradition, and public conversation meet, a topic that featured strongly in the winning entries to our latest competition, “Taste & Tales”. A collection of the submitted recipes and the stories the people behind them connect with those dishes is coming soon.
These recent events shared a focus on storytelling to both reflect heritage and influence attitudes and behaviours. Developing and sustaining strong writing and communication skills are among the key areas in which SCAF aims to support its members. The fourth SCAF residential writing retreat ran from 9–12 March at Loch Insh Outdoor Centre. The retreat was open to all SCAF members actively working on professional writing, including SCAF‑related projects, manuscripts, grant proposals and fellowship applications, with SCAF‑linked work given priority. The residential structure (3 nights’ shared accommodation, full board, and transport within Scotland) is designed to yield real progress rather than just “good intentions”, and feedback from participants subsequently showed that most left with concrete blocks of text, revised outlines, and regained confidence in work that had been looping in their heads for months. One participant said:
It is not often that you have time as a senior academic to spend some time away from administration and teaching and only focus on early career colleagues, your own research and also your peers. This was such a great opportunity to do all of these things - brainstorm with colleagues from other disciplines and institutions, chat to early career about their PhDs and their challenges, and also think about my own writing, my own ideas and ways ahead. I think in the current environment there is so little time for all of these, and for this reason this retreat is so very valuable.
Alongside writing, we looked at how members present themselves and their work publicly. The SCAF Early Career Network ran a two‑day “Multimedia Snacks” workshop – video and audio production training – on 17–18 March in Glasgow. The training aimed to help people overcome the barrier of “podcasting and vlogging, but don’t know where to start” and equip them with skills to frame questions, approach interviewees, and handle basic recording and editing. Between March and the summer, the 12 participants, from across the UK are expected to produce short interviews with people working in the Scottish food system, which will be collated into a short film for presentation to the membership; this foregrounds SCAF’s interest in not just making research outputs more visible, but also in assembling diverse voices into a shared narrative.
SCAF’s work across culture, heritage, food systems, and building researcher capacity all feed into national policy conversations, where evidence and practice need to come together to shape Scotland’s food system. On 19 March, the Scottish Food Commission hosted its launch event in Edinburgh, introducing itself as Scotland’s new independent champion for a fair, sustainble and thriving food system with the vision to “Making food work for all”. The event, attended by producers, retailers, public bodies, community organisations, academics and policymakers, framed the Commission’s role as a scrutiniser and advisor on Good Food Nation Plans, and as a conveyor of research and public interest into Scottish government conversations. Jayne Jones, who took up the post of inaugural Chief Executive in January, shared reflections on the event here. SCAF’s presence at the launch (including Jayne as CE, Emilie as one of the four commissioners and several table facilitators, including SCAF leads Dr Ada Garcia and Jill Muirie) reflected 1) the size of the opportunity for our community, and 2) a broad interest in ensuring that the research and practice threads built over the last year are visible in that emerging policy architecture, rather than remaining in separate academic silos. To learn more about the road so far, and what lies ahead, you can check these two short videos about the past and the future.
March closed with the cross-ARC webinar “Shaping Community and Lasting Impact” that pushed SCAF’s work outward into broader research‑culture spaces. Adam Smith, Programme Director for Dementia Researcher, discussed how to build community, retain researchers, and develop personal and collective research identities across the Alliances for Research Challenges – including SCAF, Brain Health, Quantum, and Energy, Homes and Livelihoods. The session underlined the idea that any research does not happen in isolation, and that long‑term impact depends on deliberate community‑building, not just on individual projects. Watch a recording of the webinar here.
First published: 16 April 2026