Breaking bread: what’s wrong with wheat?

Bread has been consumed by humans for thousands of years. This event will consider the history and environmental impact of this staple food.

Our expert panel will compare bread from different countries and cultures in terms of ingredients, nutrition, resilience to climate change and sustainable production methods.  They’ll ask why so much research is focussed on wheat and whether bread made from other things could be healthier for us and for the planet.

Please find the event report and recording here.

Our panel:

Phil Howell, Head of Breeding, NIAB

Since joining NIAB from the commercial sector in 2007, Phil has worked on breeding and pre-breeding projects including NIAB's flagship wheat resynthesis programme, the multi-partner WISP and DFW wheat pre-breeding initiatives, and the development of wheat MAGIC populations.

Phil is now leading and managing NIAB’s portfolio of breeding and pre-breeding work across a range of broad-acre arable crops, including cereals, legumes, speciality oilseeds and others. This is often collaborative work with industry partners from breeding companies, end-users and other parts of the supply chain.

Phil’s input forms a significant part of NIAB’s work to raise the profile of domestic plant protein production through legume crops and other protein sources

Dr Alexa Bellows, Research Fellow for Co-Health Benefits of Sustainable Food Systems, University of Edinburgh 

Alexa is a nutritional epidemiologist whose research focuses on improving food systems to be healthier and more sustainable.  She is interested in developing  metrics for diets and food systems to facilitate policy change. In 2022, She was awarded an IMMANA postdoctoral research fellowship to develop a metric to measure sustainability of food environments and will be piloting the metric in India and Scotland. 

Professor Shailaja Fennell, Professor of Regional Transformation and Economic Security in the Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge

Shailaja Fennell's research interests include institutional reform and collective action, food production and rural development; gender norms and gender gaps in development interventions, and provision of public goods and the role of partnerships. She has been lead investigator or co-investigator on several multi-million pound research projects funded by UKRI, ASEAN, UGC-UKIERI and DfID. She was a consultant on inequality and rural development with Oxfam, on evidence-based policy with the World Bank, and was the social science expert on agriculture and gender and an author of the European Report on Development on Fragility in Africa, 2008-09.

Professor Martin Jones, Emeritus George Pitt-Rivers Professor of Archaeological Science, University of Cambridge

Martin Jones works on archaeobotany and archaeogenetics, in the context of the broader archaeology of food. His current research interests include the spread of farming across Asia; food sharing in the Upper Palaeolithic and the development of agrarian societies and their food economies in later prehistory and historic periods.

The event will be chaired by Dr Nadia Radzman, Research Associate, Sainsbury Laboratory, University of Cambridge