What Happened This Month | June 2026
Published: 15 July 2026
June brought writing, quantum futures, and public views on food together, and continued the shift towards making SCAF’s network and activities more visible and usable.
Our fifth SCAF residential writing retreat, held from 1–4 June at the Scottish Centre for Ecology and the Natural Environment (SCENE) on Loch Lomond, brought 18 participants together, from disciplines including nutrition, mathematics and food security, translation studies, global health, health and behaviour, education, computing science, pharmacology, culture in society, and consumer ethics and sustainability. Highlights included dedicated writing time, a “structured environment” that made it easier to progress, and opportunities to meet people working on food from very different angles. A key focus of SCAF is enabling researchers and practitioners to connect outside their usual networks, which culminated at this retreat in the collective production of an artefact entitled "Strategies to make a better food future happen," building perspectives around people, funding, innovation, culture, value, and traditions. A foraging walk with Amy Rankine, a challenging quiz, playing Blood on the Clocktower with game master Jess Enright, and swimming in the loch contributed to the feeling of sharing a small window of time with a close-knit community.
From that mix of disciplines and perspectives, June also moved further into quantum–food collaborations. The second Quantum Collaborations Primer Workshop on 10 June, organised by Rachel Norman and Ife Ejidike at the University of Stirling, used a sandpit-style format to explore where quantum technologies could be applied to food research, with a particular focus on vertical growing problems and a tour of a vertical farming system in Clackmannanshire. Later in the month, the second Translating Quantum Food Futures workshop on 23 June at Stirling, part of the TQ‑FOODS project, turned attention to responsible innovation and cross‑cultural public understanding of quantum technologies in food systems. The agenda linked translation and creative practice, a campus art walk (sculpture, stories and place), roundtables on funding and writing opportunities, and future collaboration with the quantum primer and nutrition teams, alongside a scoping review of applications and responsible innovation for translational quantum tech in food systems by Dr Mausam Budhatchoki and Dr Sujita Pandey (University of Copenhagen). Together, these workshops kept quantum firmly in conversation with food, as well as with arts, humanities, and social science perspectives.
June also brought a webinar that looked directly at public attitudes: What do Scottish People Think About Food? With 31 participants, the session led by Dr Sue Bond outlined how the Food and You 2 survey measures consumer knowledge, attitudes and behaviours related to food safety, food labelling and food choices across Scotland, and summarised findings such as high reported confidence in the safety of food sold in Scotland, frequent checking of use‑by and best‑before dates, and recent shifts towards eating less processed food, more fruit and vegetables, and minimising food waste. The webinar, now on our YouTube channel also pointed to the published data tables, which offer a detailed resource for members interested in food safety practices, shopping, eating out and changes in eating habits. There is a clear potential link to SCAF’s dataset aggregator, once the survey tables are added there.
On the infrastructure side, June marked the launch of the SCAF Member Map, accompanied by a more detailed blog post. The map provides an interactive way to explore the Alliance by field, sector, institution and mentoring openness, and is being populated through an open profile submission form. It is intended to make it easier to see who is in the Alliance, where they are, and how they might connect, something that matters more as SCAF grows and as retreats, workshops and webinars bring new people into the mix.
Finally, June was the month when the third annual event moved from “save the date” to a more concrete shape. The announcement confirmed that the event will take place from 25–27 August at ONE BioHub in Aberdeen, with an Early Career Network satellite event on the first afternoon, a full conference day on the second, and an unconference on the final morning. Registration and abstract submission links are now open, and the unconference programme is being co‑produced via an online Padlet, with an ECN satellite event to be detailed separately.
We hope these activities make SCAF’s work and its network easier to navigate and more capable of producing collaborations that matter, whilst helping members write, think, and connect in ways that are deliberate and clearly linked to concrete questions about Scotland’s food futures.
First published: 15 July 2026