'If You Desire to Enjoy Life, Avoid Unpunctual People': Women, Timetabling and Domestic Advice, 1850–1910

In the second half of the nineteenth century domestic advice manuals applied the language of modern, public time management to the private sphere. This article uses domestic advice and cookery books, including Isabella Beeton's Book of Household Management, to argue that women in the home operated within multiple, overlapping temporalities that incorporated daily, annual, linear and cyclical scales. I examine how seasonal and annual timescales coexisted with the ticking clock of daily time as a framework within which women were instructed to organize their lives in order to conclude that the increasing concern of advice writers with matters of timekeeping and punctuality towards the end of the nineteenth century indicates not the triumph of 'clock time' but rather its failure to overturn other ways of thinking about and using time

Iconic dishes, culture and identity: the Christmas pudding and its hundred years’ journey in the USA, Australia, New Zealand and India

Asserting that recipes are textual evidences reflecting the society that produced them, this article explores the evolution of the recipes of the iconic Christmas pudding in the United States, Australia, New Zealand and India between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries. Combining a micro-analysis of the recipes and the cookbook that provided them with contemporary testimonies, the article observes the dynamics revealed by the preparation and consumption of the pudding in these different societies. The findings demonstrate the relevance of national iconic dishes to the study of notions of home, migration and colonization, as well as the development of a new society and identity. They reveal how the preservation, transformation and even rejection of a traditional dish can be representative of the complex and sometimes conflicting relationships between colonists, migrants or new citizens and the places they live in

Agriculture's impacts on water quality

This report is the output of a working group set up by the Global Food Security programme (GFS), under the auspices of the UK’s Water Research Innovation Partnership (UKWRIP). It considers whether it is possible to balance high aspirations for environmental water quality, with significant growth in agricultural production to meet food security objectives and provide viable livelihoods for farmers

Facing the future together: report from the Farming and Water Action Group

The report synthesises the work of three working groups focussing on: 1) Agriculture’s impacts on water quality, 2) Agriculture’s impacts on water availability; and 3) Water use in our food imports. These working groups were set up by the Global Food Security programme (GFS), under the auspices of the UK’s Water Research Innovation Partnership (UKWRIP)