Across our global cities, a diverse range of plants and dietary ingredients nourish people and enliven tables, kitchens, markets, gardens, bodies, hearts, and souls. The global presence of nutritious, delicious and culturally significant foods -- such as amaranth, bitter melon, chayote squash, daikon radish, eddo, fenugreek, gongura, hakurei turnip, ivy gourd, jute leaves, kai lan, lady finger, Malabar spinach, Napa cabbage, okra, pak choi, quince, rakkyo, shiitake, tamarind, urad bean, verdolaga, winter melon, xa lach xoong, zucchini blossoms -- emerges from the lived histories, recipes, kitchens, and gardens of the world's migrants. The diversity of foods in our modern world is directly due to the cultures, histories, ecohealth actions, and growing spaces connected to migrants. Yet, the wider significance of the migrant foodscapes of global cities such as Toronto (Canada) and London (UK) for the Anthropocene era's food sovereignty, agro-biodiversity, community health, and sustainability, is yet to be fully understood. With over a billion people on the move, international migration and migrants constitute a continuing flashpoint for debate. In current public discourse, migrants are celebrated at times, but more often, blamed and stigmatized for social ills, particularly at times of perceived crisis. This is a crucial moment in world history, as global migration increases due to climate change and geopolitics, and as cities grapple with meeting Sustainable Development Goals. With this unique Canada-UK opportunity to mobilize and disseminate scholarship toward enhanced academic and public policy knowledge outcomes, this collaborative, transnational program will mobilize, synthesize, and disseminate interdisciplinary, community-based research on how migrant foodscapes, especially the ethnocultural food gardens and connected community socio-ecological actions of urban migrants, contribute to the sustainable development of global cities and communities. Ours is a culturally, linguistically, racially, and gender diverse Canada-UK team that works at the interdisciplinary intersections of food and environmental studies, cultural studies, area studies, health, and sustainability studies. Team members have extensive experience training students and emerging scholars in participatory research approaches, social sciences and humanities research methods, multi-media research and digital humanities, in mentoring toward professional networking, and in nurturing them in community-engaged activities. This grant will enable training and mentoring opportunities for numerous students, both those directly involved with knowledge mobilization, and those who indirectly benefit from its outcomes. Future leaders will benefit from this exposure to equity-driven social policy in practice, via the program's inclusive lens on diverse urban communities that are often invisibilized. This is a transnational opportunity for emerging scholars (Yue, Elton, Rohel) to collaborate internationally with senior/mid-career scholars (Bender, Pilcher, Sharma, Song). The team is formed by experts from multiple universities, including UCL, University of Toronto, Metropolitan University of Toronto and Durham University. Team members have a strong history of engagement on transdisciplinary scholarly collaborations, and in community partnerships toward public policy outcomes. Together, they leverage this knowledge synthesis opportunity on cultures and histories to train future generations for both countries, produce academic scholarship, foster future collaboration and diverse community ties.

Based in the former princely capital of Rampur in north India, Tarana Khan is a local historian and novelist working to preserve her city's unique heritage linked to food, literature and culture. A former teacher, her motivation is the city's youth who retain a strong sense of their Rampuri heritage, even as it disappears around them. Recognizing the urgency, she began collecting oral histories from older residents known for their connections to the 'old world'. She also began exploring the famed Rampur Raza Library, with its rich and sizeable collection of Urdu and Persian manuscripts, for historic cookbooks. One Rampuri speciality, yakhni pulao - now cooked only to a basic recipe - appeared in fifty or more styles. Seeking to recreate these historic recipes, she worked with a khansama, or cook, from an old cheffing family to translate measures, procedures and ingredients into modern equivalents. A particular problem was the disappearance of older varieties of rice that had become extinct with the spread of high-yielding hybrid types. Their distinct aroma and taste remained alive only in the culinary memories of the older generation, who still yearn for tilak chandan and other small-grained local varieties previously grown in the rice-belt around Rampur. Taking a lead from this 'local food hero', this partnership bridges the gap between culinary memory, local heritage and lost agricultural varieties. Bringing food historians, sociologists, literary scholars and plant scientists into dialogue with heritage practitioners, authors, cooks and street vendors, it addresses challenges linked to local communities and food sustainability in India through four main 'work packages': 1. recovery and analysis of historic cookbooks and other literatures relating to food and food cultures preserved in colonial, national, local and family collections in India, Pakistan and the UK. 2. recording oral history to enable culinary memories to be preserved in local cultural contexts with no written record. 3. commissioning a new anthology of creative writing on South Asian food and foodways to capture memories and ideas relating to such themes as family, domesticity, hospitality and food shortage. 4. growing heritage rice varieties in controlled-environment 'virtual rice paddies' protected from modern pathogens. Preferred characteristics may then be incorporated into plants that will survive and thrive in extreme environments, while also delivering high yields and nutrients required by an ever-expanding population. The culmination of a funded-stage of the partnership will be the Rampur Food Festival. This two-day event hosted by project partner, the Rampur Raza Library, will focus on the cooking of heritage food to the recipes in Urdu and Persian manuscripts from the court of the Rampur Nawabs. Of particular note will be the use of heritage rice grown for the project to recover participants' emotional response in terms of appearance, taste and smell. In the late nineteenth century, the Rampur court was known for its patronage of an important cultural festival, the Jashn-e-Benazir, featuring poetry, music and, most significantly for our purposes, food. A distinctive feature of this event was the mixing of different social classes and communities in the shared space of bazaar culture. Building on this historic model in a contemporary context, the Rampur Food Festival will move heritage food from its 5* lodgings to street level, highlighting popularity and affordability to foster a means of livelihood for local cooks, street vendors and artisans. The festival will also showcase other partnership outputs, including a historic recipe collection making material from archival sources available to contemporary cooks and a documentary highlighting culinary memory through oral history.

EPSRC : Brendan Latham : EP/T517938/1 This project will measure the behavioural responses in a certain fly species, 'Ormia ochracea', to a variety of cricket mating songs, and from geographically separated North American populations of the fly. This type of fly attacks crickets so that their larvae may feed and mature within the cricket's body. They locate the cricket's position by following the cricket's unique mating song. Each song is very different, especially in its time-pattern (number of chirps etc). Experiments in the wild have shown that the fly populations will show distinct preferences even when all the cricket songs are equally available. How it is the flies are preferentially choosing dissimilar songs is not yet known. The research project will address this research gap by measuring fly preferences in the laboratory. It is expected this project will help us find out whether the fly populations are tuned differently to certain song patterns.