Ethnicity and consumption: South Asian food shopping patterns in Britain 1947-75

Authors' draft version also available on University of Surrey e-print repository. Final version published by Sage and available at http://joc.sagepub.com/This article reviews the literature that explores the relationship between ethnic identities and food consumption, with particular reference to business management studies. It focuses on the food shopping practices of south Asians in Britain in the period 1947 to 1975, to illustrate the need for more historically contextualized studies that can provide a more nuanced exploration of any interconnections between ethnic identity and shopping behaviour. The article draws on a reasonably long-standing interest in ethnicity and consumption in marketing studies, and explores the conceptual use of acculturation within this literature. The arguments put forward are framed by recent interdisciplinary studies of the broader relationship between consumption and identity, which stress the importance of contextualizing any influence of ethnic identifications through a wider consideration of other factors including societal status, gender and age, rather than giving it singular treatment. The article uses a body of empirical research drawn from recent oral histories, to explore how these factors informed everyday shopping practices among south Asians in Britain. It examines some of the shopping and wider food provisioning strategies adopted by early immigrants on arrival in Britain. It considers the interaction between the south Asian population and the changing retail structure, in the context of the development of self-service and the supermarket. Finally, it demonstrates how age, gender and socioeconomic status interacted with ethnic identities to produce variations in shopping patterns

Chemical intervention in plant sugar signalling increases yield and resilience

The pressing global issue of food insecurity due to population growth, diminishing land and variable climate can only be addressed in agriculture by improving both maximum crop yield potential and resilience. Genetic modification is one potential solution, but has yet to achieve worldwide acceptance, particularly for crops such as wheat. Trehalose-6-phosphate (T6P), a central sugar signal in plants, regulates sucrose use and allocation, underpinning crop growth and development. Here we show that application of a chemical intervention strategy directly modulates T6P levels in planta. Plant-permeable analogues of T6P were designed and constructed based on a ‘signalling-precursor’ concept for permeability, ready uptake and sunlight-triggered release of T6P in planta. We show that chemical intervention in a potent sugar signal increases grain yield, whereas application to vegetative tissue improves recovery and resurrection from drought. This technology offers a means to combine increases in yield with crop stress resilience. Given the generality of the T6P pathway in plants and other small-molecule signals in biology, these studies suggest that suitable synthetic exogenous small-molecule signal precursors can be used to directly enhance plant performance and perhaps other organism function

Social bias in the policing of illicit drug users in the UK and

This paper uses data from the Global Drug Survey to test the hypothesis that there is social bias in the policing of drug users, in the form of stop and search for drugs. The Global Drug Survey is a self-report, internet survey. In 2012, it included a non-random sample of illicit drug users in the UK (n=5,919) and Australia (n=5,707). We discuss previous research on social bias in policing. We argue that an intersectional approach is necessary in order to analyse patterns of stop and search for drugs across drug users who have various social statuses. In order to analyse the influence of various patterns of drug use, we create an inductive typology of a wide range of drug use types and temporalities, using latent class analysis. We use these latent classes, frequency of past month drug use and indicators of drug dependency alongside sociodemographic variables in binary logistic regression analyses of the odds of reporting being stopped and searched for drugs in the past year. We use these models to test both consensus and conflict perspectives on the policing of drug users. We find support for both perspectives in both countries. Patterns of drug use do significantly predict the odds of sampled drug users reporting police stop and search, as expected by the consensus perspective. But drug users who were younger, male and of less advantaged social status (as measured by education in the UK sample, and by minority ethnicity, income and unemployment in the Australian sample) also had significantly higher odds of reporting stop and search. This supports the conflict perspective on policing and our hypothesis that there is evidence of social bias in the policing of drug users in the Global Drug Survey sample