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Humans are riddled with life. Our bodies, homes and cities support myriad microbial biodiversity. These are generally thought of as disease-causing 'germs' that should be eradicated. But recent developments in metagenomics - the sequencing of genetic material taken from the environment - have begun to reveal the ubiquity and functional importance of the 'human microbiome': the microbial life in, on and around us. Metagenomics helps identify extensive changes in these hitherto invisible worlds with possible implications for human health. Some, like allergy, autoimmunity and antibiotic resistance, have been linked to modern hygiene practices. There is a growing popular and policy interest in the microbiome, and the possibilities of more nuanced or 'probiotic' ways of living with germs. To date however there has been limited public engagement with the science and technology of metagenomics and its potentially transformative means of representing the microbiome. This project will address this gap. Through an in-depth investigation of domestic kitchen practices, it will explore the transformative potential of metagenomics for developing new public understandings of domestic hygiene. The project research design will combine ethnographic methods with laboratory techniques, through a year long collaboration with twelve households from an urban neighbourhood. These households will be asked to survey their domestic microbiome once a month for nine months, undertaking nine metaphorical microbial safaris. The focus of these safaris will emerge from a negotiation informed by our participants' interests, relevant academic literatures and the specific concerns and expertise of our project partners. Each month we will collaboratively design a range of safe, 'antibiotic' and 'probiotic' kitchen experiments - for example involving cleaning practices and products, food preparation or sampling possible sources of kitchen microbes (e.g. pets, gardens, groceries or cars). The gathered samples will be sequenced for subsequent participatory analysis and visualisation. The outcomes and implications of each experiment will be discussed at monthly group meetings, facilitated by members of the project team, alongside project partners and invited experts. This project involves a partnership with the Food Standards Agency and aims to explore the implications of public engagements with the domestic microbiome for a range of stakeholders responsible for or interested in the management of domestic hygiene. Our participatory model will be outlined in a user report and through a practitioners' workshop. The project will deliver an extensive public database of biological and qualitative data on kitchen practices and microbiologies. It will present a range of academic outputs exploring the transformative implications of participatory metagenomics for the social and biological sciences. Good germs, bad germs will demonstrate the potential of interdisciplinary research and participatory approaches to transform how publics, policy makers and academics perceive, engage with and seek to govern microbial life. While its substantive findings will be of direct relevance to understanding the domestic microbiome, the participatory model developed through the project has great potential for future transformative research into the microbiomes of further elements of the built environment (e.g. hospitals, schools, money, transport infrastructure) as well as the intimate spaces of the human body, like the gut.

This project makes a path-breaking contribution to the agenda for tackling antimicrobial resistance (AMR) by focusing scoping research and significant networking events on a link that has so far been missing from academic and policy debate - the pivotal role of corporate food retailers. The aim of the project is to address the responsibility of retailers in tackling the AMR challenge in the context of their chicken and pork supply chains, and to investigate this evolving role and how it might be shaped in the future, in the UK and at a global scale. Against a backdrop of decades of intensive farming of animals involving the use of antibiotics, it is becoming clearer that while antimicrobials are a necessary tool to maintain health and welfare on the farm, the key issue is their inappropriate and disproportionate use in animals thereby reducing availability for humans. There is food industry-wide concern that this is leading to growing resistance amongst certain bacteria such as Salmonella, Campylobacter and E-coli, placing pressure on the sector to develop and implement standards for more responsible use. Supermarket chains are a key set of actors strategically positioned to address the global challenge of reducing antibiotic use in food supply chains and raising consumer awareness as part of tackling AMR. The project will address the role of retailers in navigating the AMR challenge through their overseas as well as their national store networks, and through supply chains that flow through spaces of the global South as well as the North. Specifically, the project addresses this role by proposing scoping research and dissemination events in the UK, where policy leadership is acknowledged and where corporate retail power is well-established. Driving the momentum of the project's policy engagement will be the support of the UK government's Food Standards Agency (FSA) as a Project Partner facilitating both a pre-project scoping workshop and a dissemination workshop at the end of the research. This reflects close alignment between the project's objectives and the emerging priorities of the FSA. The objectives of the project are: (i) to map and model the current AMR challenge involving corporate food retailers through their chicken and pork supply chains; (ii) to evaluate current and evolving corporate retail strategies and standards in the UK for reducing antibiotic use in chicken and pork supply chains; (iii) to consider the role of consumer engagement in raising standards for responsible use of antibiotics in farming; and (iv) to facilitate increased dialogue between corporate food retailers and wider institutional policy and scientific networks in the UK, in order to shape future strategy for tackling AMR. These objectives will be met through four project phases conducted over eighteen months and involving both quantitative and qualitative methods that include: the mapping and modelling with trade data of the AMR problem facing UK corporate food retailers in their supply chains; interviews with retailers' food technologists and food standards policy-makers in the UK; and interviews with a sample of UK meat producers. A project website, a stakeholder report and an end-of-project workshop in London will complement academic publications, in order to communicate the findings of the scoping research to non-academic beneficiaries and to shape evolving strategy regarding corporate food retailers' roles and responsibilities in tackling AMR.

Our seminar series aims to understand and improve UK consumers' decisions about nutrition, food safety, and food waste. Our goals align with DEFRA, the Food and Agricultural Organisation and others who use the modern view of 'food security' for developed countries, by defining it as access to food that is nutritious, affordable, safe, and sustainable, while producing minimum waste. Better food safety and reduced food waste are also high priority for the EU. Improvement is needed because (1) foodborne illnesses amount to 17 mln cases per year in the UK, including 20,000 hospitalizations and 500 deaths; (2) warnings about food risks can cause undue alarm and increase food waste; (3) UK domestic food waste is 7 mln tonnes per year, of which 4.2 mln tonnes is deemed preventable; (4) Fresh food is more nutritious but also more perishable, potentially affecting food safety and food waste; (5) UK consumers are increasingly making unhealthy food choices, contributing to 62% of UK adults being overweight or obese, and leading to health problems that cost the NHS more than £5 billion per year. Our seminar series is timely and novel because it follows calls to better understand and inform the complex decisions consumers face about nutrition, food safety, and food waste. We aim to identify strategies that help consumers to achieve nutritious food choices that both improve food safety and reduce food waste. Our seminar series has been designed by our team of practitioners and academics, with the goal of achieving the best impact. Our practitioner team members come from the Food Standards Agency which aims to improve food safety and healthy eating, as well as at the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) which aims to reduce food waste. Our academic team members come from the University of Leeds Centre for Decision Research and the Human Appetite Research Unit who are experts in consumer food choice, domestic food waste, and risk communication, as well as from the NewCastle University Food and Society Group at the School of Agriculture, Food and Rural Development who are experts in food safety and risk communication. Through 9 seminars to be held over 3 years, we will create a lasting network of users and academics who have mostly been working separately on these different topics to date. We have confirmed academic and practitioner speakers from across the UK and overseas who are key experts in the relevant domains. Seminars will be hosted at and promoted by participating universities and practitioner agencies, thus drawing diverse audiences. We will fund the travel of junior researchers and PhD students, for whom participation provides a unique opportunity for creating new networks and research ideas. Our project will identify strategies for helping consumers to improve food safety and reduce food waste. The PI and her team of users and academics will build on their international connections to share our findings at meetings with academics, users, consumers, and other interested parties worldwide. Our findings will be summarized in joint review papers that represent practitioner and academic experiences with developing effective strategies for helping consumers with food-related decisions. Our project website will provide public access to recordings and presentation slides from our seminar series, with information for academics, users and consumers about how to improve food safety and reduce food waste. Academics and users will work together to write joint grant proposals, with the goal of designing, implementing and testing the most promising strategies, thus identifying the best ways for helping consumers to make healthier, safer, and less wasteful food choices.

This research partnership involves a two-year programme of work focused on the ways in which rapidly changing cultures of poultry meat consumption and agricultural systems in particular Low and Middle Income Countries (LMICs) shape antibiotic use/misuse in farming, with implications for tackling the global antimicrobial resistance (AMR) health challenge. AMR, or in lay terms drug-resistant infections, is one of the top five priorities for the World Health Organization (WHO). The 2016 O'Neill report into 'Tackling Drug-Resistant Infections Globally' warns that if the challenge is left unaddressed, deaths resulting from AMR on a global scale are predicted within the next three decades to reach some 10 million per year. AMR in agriculture and food systems is a critical area of concern, with increasing cases reported of strains of bacteria such as E.Coli, Campylobacter and Salmonella developing resistance to particular groups of antibiotics. While antibiotics are a necessary tool to maintain health and welfare on the farm, the problem is their inappropriate and disproportionate use in animals, thereby reducing availability for humans and also catalysing resistance. The first aim of the research partnership is to evaluate the relationships between changing urban diets incorporating increased meat consumption, transforming food systems and the use/misuse of antibiotics in agriculture. It will do so through a focus on the poultry sectors of Kenya and Malawi, in particular the urban contexts of Nairobi and Lilongwe, given the rapid rise of poultry production and consumption in both places and the increased and weakly regulated use of antibiotics in production. Moreover, Kenya and Malawi are a Lower Middle Income Country and a Least Developed Country, respectively, on a continent predicted to see the highest mortality rate from AMR by 2050. The second aim is to generate culturally and geographically sensitive approaches to antibiotic reduction and stewardship initiatives in these contexts, in ways that improve implementation of their governments' AMR National Action Plans. The premise of the research is that policies and targets for the reduction of antibiotic misuse in agriculture, whilst shaped by the WHO and a 'One Health' agenda, are most likely to be effective if their implementation is responsive to the specific pressures, constraints and opportunities experienced by farmers in the context of the particular food systems in which they are embedded, and to the cultural values shaping everyday farming practice. The partnership brings together an interdisciplinary team and wider network of researchers and policy-makers across Kenya, Malawi and the UK. The core team represent the African Population and Health Research Center in Nairobi, the University of Malawi, Newcastle University, Southampton University and UCL. Collaboration in the partnership involves dialogue between the disciplines of Geography, History, Epidemiology, Medicine, Anthropology, Microbiology and Art to understand how cultural values and practices are integral to antibiotic use/misuse in the particular food systems and poultry sectors of Kenya and Malawi. The partnership also involves influential AMR policy institutions on its advisory board, including the UK's Food Standards Agency, the UN's Codex Alimentarius, Malawi's Ministry of Health and the International Livestock Research Institute in Kenya as Project Partners. The model for the partnership involves a programme of interwoven scoping research, involving secondary and primary data collection in Kenya and Malawi, and three intensive workshops in London, Nairobi and Lilongwe. Research will develop understanding of the embeddedness of antibiotic use and AMR awareness in everyday cultures and practices of subsistence and commercial farming. From this research, recommendations will be made to Kenyan and Malawian AMR policy-makers regarding culturally-sensitive and effective approaches to antibiotic stewardship.