This paper follows sorghum, an indigenous, but currently underutilized, grain in South Africa, through six encounters to discover its potential to transform the country's food system. By listening to stories from diverse perspectives, it shows that the re-inclusion of sorghum could not only diversify diets, but could also move toward breaking colonial stereotypes of what constitutes aspirational food. It employs a Follow the Thing method to unpack the multiple identities of sorghum and the role it could play in galvanizing a healthier, more diverse food system. By opening up to a radical following method that does not constrain the researcher, the underlying stories associated with sorghum are highlighted, which coincides with a shift in perception of the multiple potentialities that the crop embodies. The research highlights that a strong cultural link to sorghum remains in South Africa and that if innovation could be broadly interpreted, this might invigorate a richer engagement with sorghum, not just as a commodity, but as a culturally significant food.

Accurate measurement of household food security is essential to generate adequate information on the proportion of households experiencing food insecurity, especially in areas or regions vulnerable to food shortages and famine. This manuscript offers a methodological examination of three commonly used indicators of household food security - experience of hunger, dietary diversity, and coping strategies. Making use of data from the Agincourt Health and Demographic Surveillance Site in rural South Africa, we examine the association between the indicators themselves to improve understanding of the different insight offered by each food security "lens." We also examine how the choice of indicator shapes the profile of vulnerable households, with results suggesting that dietary diversity scores may not adequately capture broader food insecurity. Concluding discussion explores programmatic and policy implications as related to methodological choices.

There warrants a discussion regarding how nutrition discourses transform lay health practices. Here, I discuss how the adaptation of nutrition discourses among Latina immigrants in San Francisco produces a negotiation between a discourse of nourishment and a discourse of satisfaction in their practice of comiendo bien (eating well). The discourse of satisfaction refers to eating as a way to fulfill symbolic, material or embodied desires, while a discourse of nourishment focuses on supplying the body with nutrients. Negotiating between these discourses transforms comiendo bien if: (1) Latino immigrant families have the resources to adhere to nutritional recommendations; and (2) the adherence to the nutritional recommendation transgresses a negative emotional or physical experience. Appropriating nutrition discourses produces food restrictions that disengage the body from culture and relegate eating to an alienated task. Although a nutritional approach to comiendo bien produces conflict between satisfaction and nourishment, "healthy eating" remains a juxtaposition between satisfaction and nourishment.

Cultured meat is a novel technology that uses tissue engineering to expand cells taken from animals to grow muscle for consumption as food. Those supporting the technology anticipate it could radically disrupt livestock farming with, they propose, significant benefits for the environment, human health, and animal wellbeing. This paper examines the emergence of this sector through the prism of one of the leading companies - Memphis Meats - in particular focusing upon their online recruitment activity in online videos. Founded in 2015, by 2020 they had announced investment of over $160 m to build a pilot-plant and recruit staff to bring cultured meat closer to commercialization. This paper argues the company's recruitment videos work to enact what I term "producibility", a concept aligned to existing work on "edibility", that emphasizes the process of becoming that foodstuff (included novel foodstuffs) undergo. I deploy existing theoretical work on multiple categories of futures - big/little, individual/institutional/field - to analyze Memphis Meats' online recruitment activity. I argue that, by entangling science and food futures, the company's videos work to assert the status and politics of cultured meat, render it producible and edible, and articulate a novel and transformative food-professional identity: the cultured meat producer.

Muslim consumers in the UK eat more meat than the national average. Individuals from ethnic minority backgrounds, particularly South Asian communities, experience poorer health outcomes, including diabetes and cardiovascular disease, associated with meat consumption. According to a YouGov survey, British Pakistani and Bangladeshi consumers use television cookery programs and social media (particularly YouTube) as their main digital sources of dietary information. Against this background, this study uses a mixed-method approach to show how meat is normalized in YouTube recipe content. Using quantitative analysis of 77 recent recipe videos presented by four leading British chefs (Jamie Oliver, Gordon Ramsay, Nigella Lawson and Nadiya Hussain) and halal recipe videos, we find that meat-based recipes overwhelmingly outnumber vegetarian/vegan ones, and that, whereas environmental or animal welfare concerns are hardly mentioned, health narratives feature in some videos. Using critical discourse analysis of a sample of videos, we show how meat consumption is rationalized by the "absenting" of meat's animal origins (making it "normal"), the "defaultization" of meat (making it "natural" and "necessary"), and "positive emotional routines" (making it "nice" and "necessary"). We consider how these representations of meat serve to overcome the "meat paradox" and legitimize, and thereby normalize, meat consumption among British Muslims.

Over the past decade home cooking in the Senegalese city of Dakar has come to be dominated by culinary practices of : the incorporation of new commodities and flavor enhancers and the invention of new cooking techniques that intensify the taste of everyday dishes. Producing a well flavored meal is a crucial part of women's domestic work, but cooks are increasingly critiqued in Dakar, accused of traducing culinary heritage, challenging the authority of elders, and spreading metabolic disease. Drawing on ethnographic research in Senegalese households and qualitative interviews and focus groups with women who prepare food, I introduce the analytical category of "flavor work" to show how the everyday making of taste in a West African city is embedded in historical and contemporary forms of household social reproduction. Controversy over the taste of home cooking reveals how women's flavor work serves a double reproductive purpose. Flavor work creates culturally coherent and intelligible meals, but it also forms part of broader subsistence strategies: techniques for navigating scarcity and rupture.