Uncategorized

Stakeholder engagement in European research and innovation

Published open access in Open Research Europe in November 2025. The research presented in this paper was supported by the EU Horizon project CLEVERFOOD under grant agreement No. 101086320. View full text here. Citation: Gudek, L., Rao, M., & Broerse, J. (2025). Stakeholder engagement in European research and innovation: An investigation into how and why EU […]

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Uncategorized

The transformative potential of universal school meals

Written for the Good Food Movement as part of my monthly column ‘The Plate and the Planet’. Published in October 2025. Header image credit: Alia Sinha for the Good Food Movement. A few months ago, I delivered a guest lecture on policies addressing the human right to food. During the question-and-answer session that followed, a […]

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Education, Safety & Quality

Food safety beyond lab tests and regulations

After a successful guest lecture in 2024, I was invited by the coordinators of the course ‘Becoming Food: Cellular Agriculture beyond the Lab’ at Wageningen University to deliver a guest lecture on the future of food safety in September 2025. My talk was titled ‘Beyond lab tests and regulations: The need for a holistic understanding […]

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Trends and Innovation

Food for all: Media, communication and food democracy 

In September 2025, I joined the 4th Conference on Food & Communication in Lille, France. Aiming to to critically explore the diverse roles of media and communication in shaping and advancing food democracy, the conference brought together communication scholars, media researchers, and linguists working on these themes. I had the chance to present research that […]

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Agriculture & Production

What it takes to feed India’s growing cities

Written for the Good Food Movement as part of my monthly column ‘The Plate and the Planet’. Published in July 2025. Header image credit: Alia Sinha for the Good Food Movement. Every morning, as India’s cities slowly come to life, crates of vegetables and fruits—some harvested just hours earlier in fields nearby—are unloaded in wholesale […]

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Sustainability

Traditional knowledge at the centre of a circular bioeconomy

Citation: Rao, M. (2025) Traditional knowledge at the centre of a circular bioeconomy. Nature Food. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-025-01205-zHeader image credit: UNDP The circular bioeconomy is often presented as a frontier of cutting-edge innovation, where science, technology, and sustainability converge to create new possibilities. However, during my PhD research on food waste valorisation, I started to notice something less […]

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