Circular Cooking: Co-designing Food, Energy, and Resource Resilience with Nottingham Communities (CIRCoN) – Collaboratory Research Hub 2027 PhD Studentship

While food banks provide essential access to food, the ability of recipients to prepare, cook, store and preserve that food is less visible. For lower-income households, these everyday activities may be shaped by energy affordability, access to suitable appliances, kitchen and storage capacity, housing conditions, household circumstances and culturally specific cooking practices. Nottingham’s Himmah Food Bank has publicly documented experience which demonstrates the scale and complexity of this local need. Himmah runs Nottingham’s largest independent food bank, distributing more than 1,000 food parcels each month and 11,176 emergency food parcels in 2025, including Halal provision for culturally diverse communities. Its annual reporting also identifies rising household energy bills and other essential costs as factors intensifying demand for food-bank support. In addition, its hot-meal services support people experiencing hardship, including those without cooking facilities, while its cooking classes teach nutritious meal preparation on tight budgets and create space for sharing culturally diverse food knowledge. The PhD has been developed with partners at Himmah to investigate this gap in relation to Himmah’s work and its communities.

Food insecurity is commonly understood in terms of a household’s access to food. However, less attention is given to the broader view of whether households have the physical, financial and energy capacity to transform that food into meals. The experience of food insecurity in lower-income households includes more than just access to food, but also the ability to prepare, cook, store and preserve food is shaped not only by food and energy affordability, but also by the built environment in which every day cooking takes place. Housing conditions, kitchen size and configuration, ventilation, energy infrastructure, appliance provision and storage capacity can all influence what households are practically able to cook and how much energy this requires. Together, these factors represent an intersection between food insecurity and the transition towards Net Zero, which has so far been overlooked.

Cooking connects important structural, cultural, and financial issues in people’s everyday lives. Cooking is influenced by housing infrastructure and household energy demand with appliance use, food utilisation and waste, cultural practices and affordability. Yet these relationships are rarely considered together as a holistic picture, particularly from the perspective of households experiencing food and energy insecurity. Working with Himmah Food Bank the communities it serves in Nottingham, this PhD will investigate how everyday cooking can contribute to more circular household and community resource systems.

Circular cooking is understood here as reducing avoidable food and energy losses, extending the useful life and use of food and appliances, and identifying feasible opportunities for resources to be reused, recovered or recirculated. This PhD asks: How can everyday cooking within lower-income housing become part of a more circular system in which food, energy and associated resources are used efficiently, retained, reused or recovered rather than treated through a linear input-output model? Using participatory cooking sessions alongside the investigation of household, housing, and kitchen conditions, the research will examine how housing infrastructure, access to appliances, energy affordability, food storage, and culturally situated cooking practices enable or constrain circular practices.

Community participants will contribute their lived experience and cooking knowledge to identifying barriers and co-developing realistic solutions. The research will develop a people-centred Circular Cooking Framework connecting housing, energy and food systems. This will provide evidence and practical guidance for food banks, housing providers, local authorities and other local organisations to support affordable, culturally appropriate and resource-efficient cooking and contribute to a more inclusive and socially just Net Zero transition.

This project has been co-created with and is supervised by researchers from Nottingham Trent University, the University of Nottingham, and partners at Himmah Food Bank. The successful candidate for this project will be enrolled at Nottingham Trent University.

Project Aims and Objectives

This project aims to support households experiencing food insecurity by investigating how everyday cooking practices can contribute to more circular household and community resource systems by examining how housing and kitchen conditions shape food and energy use, resource losses, and opportunities for reuse, recovery and recirculation.

The project objectives are:

• To examine how everyday cooking practices, together with housing and kitchen conditions, shape food and energy use, resource losses and circular practices within lower-income households and communities.

• To identify and evaluate the opportunities, barriers and trade-offs associated with reducing avoidable food and energy losses and enabling feasible forms of resource reuse, recovery and recirculation associated with cooking.

• To co-develop a people-centred Circular Cooking Framework that identifies practical, affordable and culturally appropriate pathways towards more circular cooking practices at household and community scales.

What is Collaboratory?

Collaboratory is a research programme, led by Universities for Nottingham and the Leicester Universities Partnership, that places community knowledge and experience at the heart of research. This eight-year initiative is pioneering a new approach to collaboration, working closely with local communities and community-focused organisations to develop and deliver research that addresses the needs and priorities of local communities.

Supervisors