This past week wasn’t terribly exciting (but very interesting), with Monday being a day full of presentations on the journeys of various foods in the system. My group chose to research Cheddar cheese (no whey would I pass up an opportunity to do a project surrounding cheese). Tuesday, we had a lecture on marketing and food, as well as meetings to really start putting our dissertation proposals together (it’s due in less than three weeks!).

The week previous was all about taking a closer and behind the scenes look into the food system.

They kept a close eye on us.

On Monday, we focused on meat processing and paid a visit to a venison farm and processor in Fife called Stagison and in Lithingow, Campbells Prime Meat, a much larger Scottish equivalent to the local food distributor, Hudson Valley Harvest, I worked for back in New York.

Tuesday, we paid a visit to the Tesco Distribution Centre in Livingston, the supermarket chain’s largest in Europe. There we learnt about what goes into running a place like that and its massive reach (serves all of Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Northern England).

That afternoon, we paid a visit to Perthshire Preserves, a small (but rapidly growing) jam company in you guessed it, Perthshire. After speaking to us about how they got into the business and current growing pains, they kindly gifted each of us with some of their orange marmalade with or without whisky… naturally, I opted for the boozy preserve.

Apologies for the brevity of this post, projects, seminars, and dissertation proposals (oh my!) are occupying much of my time right now…