Kathleen Steeden

Farmers are increasingly being encouraged to diversify into new areas in order to generate additional income, be it through tourism, green energy or alternative livestock. Stories of successful ventures abound in the media, and the message to farmers seems to be that they should expect to adapt and diversify if they want to survive. But if diversification is really the future of farming, what does this mean for farmers?

In June 2016, the Prince’s Countryside Fund published a report that posed the question ‘Is there a future for the small family farm in the UK?’ The British dairy industry may offer one sobering answer. Figures released in 2016 by the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB) show that in the beleaguered British dairy sector, one in 10 farms were forced to close between 2013 and 2016 – over 1,000 farms in three years.

Public, media and corporate awareness of the need to tackle food waste appears to be higher than ever, but evidence suggests that despite this growing awareness, efforts to cut household food waste in the UK seem to have stalled. Research published last month by the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) revealed that not only did the UK government fail to reach its target for cutting household food waste in 2015, but UK households actually threw away more food per person than in 2012.

According to research by the charity WRAP (Waste and Resources Action Programme), the amount of food that is wasted annually in UK pubs and restaurants is equivalent to throwing away one in every six of the eight billion meals served each year. Now, a new generation of chefs and restaurateurs are taking action on food waste, and by developing new ways of working, issue a challenge to the UK restaurant industry: do things better. 

Brighton is abuzz in summer, but as hordes of out-of-towners descend on the beach, it can be nice to head out of the city and explore the surrounding area, from the rolling hills of the South Downs to the dramatic cliffs of Seven Sisters. And as every Brit knows, at the end of each mini adventure awaits a good pub.

Liverpool has big plans for a ‘New Chinatown’ – but what will this mean for the area’s existing Chinese community? As the Year of the Monkey gets underway, work is set to begin on an ambitious £200 million project to regenerate Liverpool’s Chinatown. The plans for the long-vacant Tribeca fields site offer a modern vision for a ‘New Chinatown’, which will include 850 new residential units, a hotel, restaurants and a specialist Chinese-themed retail area.

As the exhibition Art From Elsewhere opens in Bristol, Copyright considers the role art can play in broadening our global perspective. ‘I tried very hard to cut the sky in half,’ proclaims Shilpa Gupta’s artwork There is No Border Here. Seen from a distance, the work is an anonymous yellow flag drawn against a wall. As the viewer moves closer, it is revealed that the flag is actually a visual poem and, drawing nearer still, it becomes apparent that the lines themselves are composed of a

With the increasing need for businesses to operate in an environmentally conscious way, the restaurant industry is being put under the sustainability spotlight. Fortunately, this could be good news for restaurateurs, as well as the environment.

Despite its beauty, the province of Kodagu in the Indian state of Karnataka remains a world away from the well-worn backpacker circuit, still more popular with domestic tourists on weekend getaways from the southern cities of Bengaluru and Mangalore than with foreign travellers. Kodagu, formerly known as Coorg, is a region of wild forested mountains in the lush Western Ghats. The area was famously praised by the author Dervla Murphy, who declared it a ‘Garden of Eden’ in her famous travelogue On a Shoestring to Coorg, which recounted her journeys through the region in the early 1970s.

A new veg hero, an awful lot of offal and Instagrammable food: we take a look at what’s hotting up in the Asian restaurant world in 2016.