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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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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Written for the Good Food Movement as part of my monthly column ‘The Plate and the Planet’. Published in September 2025. Header image credit: Alia Sinha for the Good Food Movement. Walk into any grocery store today, and you’re likely to find shelves stacked with shiny packets, instant mixes, and colourful snacks that promise taste, […]
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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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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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Written for the Good Food Movement as part of my monthly column ‘The Plate and the Planet’. Published in July 2025. Header image credit: Prabhakaran S for Good Food Movement. What makes Darjeeling tea truly Darjeeling? How much of its fiery strength does the Guntur Sannam chilli owe to the growers who know just when to […]
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Published in Tijdschrift voor Levensmiddelenrecht in July 2025. The full text can be found here. If you are interested in the article but do not have institutional access, please reach out to me via the contact page. Image credit: Maria Verkhoturtseva. Title Artisanal fermentation as a regulatory grey area in EU food law Abstract Artisanal […]
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Published open access in The Journal of Climate Change and Health in July 2025. I contributed to this multi-disciplinary collaborative study by assisting with research design and qualitative data analysis. Image credit: ‘Flooded Home V’ by Nina Jordan via The Met. View full text here. Title Preemptive hospital evacuation during the 2021 European floods: A […]
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In June 2025, I was invited to teach at the annual summer school organised by Norway’s National Research School in Nutrition (NutriNOR) that took place in Bergen. This year’s overarching theme was ‘food processing’ and the three-day summer school included lectures and workshops on the topic by experts from a variety of fields such as […]
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Written for the Good Food Movement as part of my monthly column ‘The Plate and the Planet’. Published in June 2025. Header image credit: Kaushani Mufti for the Good Food Movement. Across India, it is not uncommon to find people relying on nature and its signs to determine the course of their own actions, from […]
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