| 1. |
- kaiser, matthias, et al.
(författare)
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Food ethics: a Wide Field in Need of Dialogue
- 2016
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Ingår i: Food Ethics. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 2364-6853 .- 2364-6861. ; 1:1, s. 1-7
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- There are a few things which are obviously a central part of everyone’s life, at all times, and all over the globe, and which are crucial for our wellbeing. Food is, like sex, such an essential ingredient of our life, an ingredient of what we expect of a good life. What is on our plates is always a result of nature and culture, to the extent that it may seem hard to find commonalities in our global diet. As academics we have asked different questions about food. For a long time these questions have been dominated by the quest to secure enough food and to improve what we have got. It is, however, noteworthy that we also always have asked the normative questions in relation to food: Is it right to eat this kind of food? Do we produce our food the right way? Is there injustice and bad power in the way we distribute the food? Are we lied to in regard to what is on our plate? When we enter the normative realm, we enter the realm of ethics, understood in a wide and comprehensive way. As all normative questions, we need to be well informed by knowledge about how the world is, and what is at stake and for whom. We call this food ethics. Food ethics raises issues and asks questions in relation to food all along the value chains. It also puts things into relation with each other. At the same time it disentangles complex heaps of factors and pieces of knowledge, and looks for guidance. It is issue driven, rather than interest driven. It unites scholars with farmers and fishermen, chefs with industry, consumers with lawyers, and food citizens with authorities. As a young field within academia it is important to guard against efforts to appropriate the field for narrow interests, and instead to combine the natural and social sciences in analysing and addressing the challenges. We do not necessarily call for the grand ethical theory that explains it all, but rather start with the simple things in a very complex overall picture. We want to draw attention to ethically significant facts, discuss problematic developments, point to genuine dilemmas, learn about food relevant contexts and history, and look for individual, professional and institutional responses to ethical challenges and issues. Thus, one of the missions of this new journal Food Ethics, is to widen the scope and the discussion on the topic, and to be inclusive in terms of who has something to contribute to the field. There is no escaping from confronting very complex issues when it comes to managing one of the most basic needs we all have, food. As editors of this new journal we maintain that food ethics deserves special and inter-disciplinary attention by researchers, that it is not sufficiently dealt with by what is currently known as bioethics, that it is intrinsically connected with the so-called grand societal challenges of our time, that it is a globally important field which demands particular attention to complexities and uncertainties, as much as it needs to be explicit about what values are at stake and for whom, and which normative principles it touches upon.
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| 2. |
- Munthe, Christian, 1962
(författare)
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Precaution and Ethics: Handling risks, uncertainties and knowledge gaps in the regulation of new biotechnologies
- 2017
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Bok (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This volume outlines and analyses ethical issues actualized by applying a precautionary approach to the regulation of new biotechnologies. It presents a novel way of categorizing and comparing biotechnologies from a precautionary standpoint. Based on this, it addresses underlying philosophical problems regarding the ethical assessment of decision-making under uncertainty and ignorance, and discusses how risks and possible benefits of such technologies should be balanced from an ethical standpoint. It argues on conceptual and ethical grounds for a technology neutral regulation as well as for a regulation that not only checks new technologies but also requires old, inferior ones to be phased out. It demonstrates how difficult ethical issues regarding the extent and ambition of precautionary policies need to be handled by such a regulation, and presents an overarching framework for doing so.
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| 3. |
- Goddek, Simon, et al.
(författare)
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Aquaponics and Global Food Challenges
- 2019
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Ingår i: Aquaponics Food Production Systems. - : Springer Verlag. - 9783030159436
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)
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| 4. |
- Goddek, Simon, et al.
(författare)
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Decoupled aquaponic systems
- 2019
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Ingår i: Aquaponics Food Production Systems. - London : Springer. - 9783030159436
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)
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| 5. |
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| 6. |
- Ritter, Camila, et al.
(författare)
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Biodiversity assessments in the 21st century: The potential of insect traps to complement environmental samples for estimating eukaryotic and prokaryotic diversity using high-throughput DNA metabarcoding.
- 2019
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Ingår i: Genome. - : Canadian Science Publishing. - 1480-3321 .- 0831-2796. ; 62:3, s. 147-159
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The rapid loss of biodiversity, coupled with difficulties in species identification, call for innovative approaches to assess biodiversity. Insects make up a substantial proportion of extant diversity and play fundamental roles in any given ecosystem. To complement morphological species identification, new techniques such as metabarcoding make it possible to quantify insect diversity and insect-ecosystem interactions through DNA sequencing. Here we examine the potential of bulk insect samples (i.e., containing many non-sorted specimens) to assess prokaryote and eukaryote biodiversity and to complement the taxonomic coverage of soil samples. We sampled 25 sites on three continents and in various ecosystems, collecting insects with Slam-traps (Brazil) and Malaise-traps (South Africa and Sweden). We then compared our diversity estimates with the results obtained with biodiversity data from soil samples from the same localities. We found a largely different taxonomic composition between the soil and insect samples, testifying to the potential of bulk insect samples to complement soil samples. Finally, we found that non-destructive DNA extraction protocols, which preserve insect specimens for morphological studies, constitute a promising choice for cost-effective biodiversity assessments. We propose that the sampling and sequencing of insect samples should become a standard complement for biodiversity studies based on environmental DNA.
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| 7. |
- Almered Olsson, Gunilla, 1951, et al.
(författare)
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Food systems sustainability - For whom and by whom? : An examination of different 'food system change' viewpoints
- 2018
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Ingår i: Development Research Conference 2018: “Rethinking development”, 22–23 August 2018, Gothenburg, Sweden.
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- The United Nations identifies the food crisis as one of the primary overarching challenges facing the international community. Different stakeholders in the food system have widely different perspectives and interests, and challenging structural issues, such as the power differentials among them, remain largely unexamined. These challenges make rational discourse among food system actors from different disciplines, sectors and levels difficult. These challenges can often prevent them from working together effectively to find innovative ways to respond to food security challenges. This means that finding solutions to intractable and stuck issues, such as the food crisis often stall, not at implementation, but at the point of problem identification. Food system sustainability means very different things to different food system actors. These differences in no way undermine or discount the work carried out by these players. However, making these differences explicit is an essential activity that would serve to deepen theoretical and normative project outcomes. Would the impact and reach of different food projects differ if these differences were made explicit? The purpose of this initial part of a wider food system research project is not to search for difference or divergence, with the aim of critique, but rather to argue that by making these differences explicit, the overall food system project engagement will be made more robust, more inclusive and more encompassing. This paper starts with some discussion on the different food system perspectives, across scales, regions and sectors but focuses primarily on the design of processes used to understand these divergent and at times contradictory views of what a sustainable food system may be. This paper draws on ongoing work within the Mistra Urban Futures project, using the food system projects in cities as diverse as Cape Town, Manchester, Gothenburg and Kisumu as sites for this enquiry.
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| 8. |
- Nilsson, R. Henrik, 1976, et al.
(författare)
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Top 50 most wanted fungi
- 2016
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Ingår i: MycoKeys. - : Pensoft Publishers. - 1314-4057 .- 1314-4049. ; 12, s. 29-40
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Environmental sequencing regularly recovers fungi that cannot be classified to any meaningful taxonomic level beyond “Fungi”. There are several examples where evidence of such lineages has been sitting in public sequence databases for up to ten years before receiving scientific attention and formal recognition. In order to highlight these unidentified lineages for taxonomic scrutiny, a search function is presented that produces updated lists of approximately genus-level clusters of fungal ITS sequences that remain unidentified at the phylum, class, and order levels, respectively. The search function (https://unite.ut.ee/top50.php) is implemented in the UNITE database for molecular identification of fungi, such that the underlying sequences and fungal lineages are open to third-party annotation. We invite researchers to examine these enigmatic fungal lineages in the hope that their taxonomic resolution will not have to wait another ten years or more.
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| 9. |
- Algers, Anne, 1961, et al.
(författare)
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Open Knowledge about Slaughter on the Internet-A Case Study on Controversies.
- 2017
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Ingår i: Animals : an open access journal from MDPI. - : MDPI AG. - 2076-2615. ; 7:12, s. 1-11
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Knowledge about slaughter of animals for human food is often perceived as controversial and therefore not made widely available. An open educational resource on the Internet about the slaughter of animals has created tension at launch but also resolved tension. Aiming to explore how this resource at the boundary between academia and society is perceived, a study was carried out with participants from slaughterhouses, universities, authorities and NGOs. Focus group sessions were video recorded and transcripts were coded using an interpretive thematic analysis. The results show that an open educational resource in addition to contributing to learning and awareness raising can also induce dialogue (and thus resolve tension) about animal welfare and contribute to animal welfare resilience. Our results also indicate that participants had diverse opinions about the influence of multimedia on attitudes towards animal slaughter. The use of additional instruments such as comment fields may lead to more knowledgeable citizens and socially robust knowledge, but has to be carefully weighed against the risk of false or fake data.
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| 10. |
- Chodkowska-Miszczuk, Justyna, et al.
(författare)
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Biogas enterprises : A chance or a challenge for rural development?
- 2018
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Ingår i: Challenged Ruralities. - Copenhagen : University of Copenhagen – Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management.
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper addresses the question whether biogas plants (businesses based on renewable energy) often marketed as a great opportunity for rural development can at the same time pose a hidden challenge. Departing from the concept of embeddedness of enterprises in the local environment, our objective is realized with the help of two models of biogas plants. In the first model, biogas plants operate as an integral part of agricultural farms (biogas on-farm model); in the second model, they operate as independent companies established through investments by external entrepreneurs (biogas off-farm model). The two models have proven to affect the economies of particular biogas enterprises very differently. In the first model, the support of existing agricultural farms is of great importance as those usually are important for local stakeholders. In the second model, biogas plants that emerge as new external investments must build interactions with local entities from scratch. From an economic point of view, the lack of functioning mechanisms in this sense may influence further directions of development for many rural areas traditionally associated with agriculture.
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