Towards Resilient Industrial Socio-Metabolic relations (TRI SOME CHICKEN)

The project brings together two human geographers, a physical geographer, a zoologist, a food policy nutritionist and a cultural humanities scholar, with poultry industry project partners, poultry R&D subcontractors, policymakers and consumers. It does this through the following work-streams: WS1: Socio-Metabolic Consumption: Feeding and Eating Chicken. We will undertake qualitative research interviews with UK chicken consumers (foodbank users, middle-income), chicken retailers, and poultry feed manufacturers, integrators, food production operatives, and nutrition biochemists, to discover experiences of nutritional insecurity, metabolic vulnerability, and tactics of nutritional and metabolic resilience. WS2: Socio-Metabolic Environments: Chicken Production in Time and Place.? We will use farmer interviews and ethnographies alongside existing data to study the drivers of recent historic variability in chicken production and trade (weather, input costs, regulatory changes, etc.) to assess the goods and harms for chickens, land and water environments, biodiversity, poultry producers and integrators, consumers and retailers.?We will produce a model of resilient industrial socio-metabolics in order to identify risks and potential interventions under current and future climate and policy scenarios. WS3: Socio-Metabolic Politics: Risks and Ethical Principles of Chicken. We will convene stakeholder workshops, publish a series of policy briefs and podcast interviews, to co-develop a novel policy instrument of ethical principles for resilient food system thinking that is relevant and has buy-in from stakeholders across the sector. The project will create increased interdisciplinary research capacity between academics and non-academic partners. valuable insights and policy interventions to strengthen a resilient UK food system that is ethical, sustainable and equitable, supporting improved human and chicken health and wellbeing. a unique socio-metabolic dynamic foodsystems framework for understanding how the poultry sector has, and could, approach resilience to extreme weather and trade disruptions. a socio-metabolic resilience modelling blue-print for other food industries to follow.