Category: News

Can recipe boxes give families with school-aged children the opportunity to access more affordable healthy food?

In this episode of The Food Foundation’s podcast – Pod Bites – the MRC Epidemiology Unit’s Noah Cooke discusses how families in Birmingham are involved in the Recipe Box research and randomised control trial, which is believed to be the first of its kind.

The research is led by The Mandala Consortium, led by Prof Martin White, Professor of Population Health Research in the MRC Epidemiology Unit. The consortium brings together internationally renowned teams from the Universities of Cambridge, Birmingham, Warwick, Exeter, and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and focuses on transforming urban food systems for planetary and population health.

Listen to Pod Bites: Can Recipe Boxes improve our diets?

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At Mandala we’re conducting a range of research projects across Birmingham to investigate how the food system is changing right now, and how it could change in the future.

We’ll be checking in before and after these projects through a series of short films – Stories from a Changing Food System – produced by Good Stories in Food.

The first of these films profiles our research with Change Kitchen, a social enterprise in Balsall Health, Birmingham which is aiming to provide healthy, sustainable and affordable vegetarian food.

Continue reading “Stories from a Changing Food System: Change Kitchen” →

In early December, members of the Mandala Consortium visited Birmingham to explore different aspects of the city’s food environment, systems and culture. In a packed 24 hours, researchers from the team visited a primary school, a hospital, the city markets, shops and restaurants, a fruit and vegetable wholesaler and a community growing site. We heard about how food is produced, processed, moved and consumed in the city. It’s not possible in this short space to cover everything we learned, but we wanted to share a few highlights.

Continue reading “The City of a Thousand Flavours – Reflections on a Birmingham visit” →