In an increasingly global world, societies are being provisioned from a bewildering array of sources as new countries and new food commodities are drawn into international markets. Globalising Food provides an innovative contribution to the area of political economy of agriculture, food and consumption through a revealing investigation of the globalisation and restructuring of localised agricultural sectors and food systems. The book draws on new theoretical perspectives and wide-ranging case studies from Britain, the USA, India, South Africa, New Zealand and Latin America. The key themes addresses range from giant multinational food corporations, rural industrialisation and World Bank policies, to the regulation of pollution, labour relations, urban food politics and environmental sustainability. Globalising Food offers important insights into the problems, consequences and limits of the industrialisation of agriculture and the provisioning of food in a global world as we approach the new millenium.

This open access book approaches the anxieties inherent in food consumption and production in Vietnam. The country’s rapid and recent economic integration into global agro-food systems and consumer markets spurred a new quality of food safety concerns, health issues and distrust in food distribution networks that have become increasingly obscured. This edited volume further puts the eating body centre stage by following how gendered body norms, food taboos, power structures and social differentiation shape people’s ambivalent relations with food. It uncovers Vietnam’s trajectories of agricultural modernisation against which consumers and producers manoeuvre amongst food self-sufficiency, security and abundance. Food Anxiety in Globalising Vietnam is explicitly about ‘dangerous’ food – regarding its materiality and meaning. It provides social science perspectives on anxieties related to food and surrounding discourses that travel between the local and the global, the individual and society and into the body. Therefore, the book’s lens of food anxiety matters for social theory and for understanding the embeddedness and discontinuities of food globalizations in Vietnam and beyond. Due to its rich empirical base, methodological approaches and thematic foci, it will appeal to scholars, practitioners and students alike.--

This open access book approaches the anxieties inherent in food consumption and production in Vietnam. The country's rapid and recent economic integration into global agro-food systems and consumer markets spurred a new quality of food safety concerns, health issues and distrust in food distribution networks that have become increasingly obscured. This edited volume further puts the eating body centre stage by following how gendered body norms, food taboos, power structures and social differentiation shape people's ambivalent relations with food. It uncovers Vietnam's trajectories of agricultural modernisation against which consumers and producers manoeuvre amongst food self-sufficiency, security and abundance. Food Anxiety in Globalising Vietnam is explicitly about 'dangerous' food - regarding its materiality and meaning. It provides social science perspectives on anxieties related to food and surrounding discourses that travel between the local and the global, the individual and society and into the body. Therefore, the book's lens of food anxiety matters for social theory and for understanding the embeddedness and discontinuities of food globalizations in Vietnam and beyond. Due to its rich empirical base, methodological approaches and thematic foci, it will appeal to scholars, practitioners and students alike. This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.

Although South Asian cookery and gastronomy has transformed contemporary urban foodscape all over the world, social scientists have paid scant attention to this phenomenon. Curried Cultures–a wide-ranging collection of essays–explores the relationship between globalization and South Asia through food, covering the cuisine of the colonial period to the contemporary era, investigating its material and symbolic meanings. Curried Cultures challenges disciplinary boundaries in considering South Asian gastronomy by assuming a proximity to dishes and diets that is often missing when food is a lens to investigate other topics. The book’s established scholarly contributors examine food to comment on a range of cultural activities as they argue that the practice of cooking and eating matter as an important way of knowing the world and acting on it.

Within the international agri-food community at least four theoretical targets are attracting increasing attention. They are: (1) the established notions of networks and commodity chains that are being revisited by way of critical engagement informed by the insights of in-depth empirical work, (2) the metrics of calculation and institutional embedding that underpin the rise and functionality of governance technologies, (3) the place of regional networking in creating conditions that make possible agri-food producer participation in local provisioning and supply, and (4) the geo-historical dimensions of interconnection and interdependency in the agri-food sphere. This volume brings together an interdisciplinary team of anthropologists, economists, business and management academics and geographers to examine a wide range of case studies illustrating various agri-food commodity chains and networks around the world and to discuss how they link globally.

Food is increasingly traded internationally, thereby transforming the organization of food production and consumption globally and influencing most food-related practices. This transition is generating unfamiliar challenges related to sustainability of food provision, the social impacts of international trade and global food governance. Distance in time and space between food producers and consumers is increasing and new concerns are arising. These include the environmental impact of food production and trade, animal welfare, the health and safety of food and the social and economic impact of international food trade. This book provides an overview of the principal conceptual frameworks that have been developed for understanding these changes. It shows how conventional regulation of food provision through sovereign national governments is becoming elusive, as the distinctions between domestic and international, and between public and private spheres, disappear. At the same time multi-national companies and supranational institutions put serious limits to governmental interventions. In this context, other social actors including food retailers and NGOs are shown to take up innovative roles in governing food provision, but their contribution to agro-food sustainability is under continuous scrutiny. The authors apply these themes in several detailed case studies, including organic, fair trade, local food and fish. On the basis of these cases, future developments are explored, with a focus on the respective roles of agricultural producers, retailers and consumers.

Food security will exist when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life (as stated in the Rome Declaration in 1996). Given the dimension of the current global food crisis, food security means adopting effective and specific actions at individual, household, national, regional and global levels. Food security invites us to reflect upon ethical principles like human equity, justice between current and future generations, respect for human dignity and sustainable food production. We strive to maintain our basic ethical convictions and engage in societal debates about other important values. While we do this, we may have to change our ways of life and learn to create new priorities in the face of global responsibility. Science and technology are key tools to reach the Millenium Goals, providing both society and decision makers alike with relevant information and new options within an ethical framework. The contributions found in this publication bring together the perspectives of a diverse group of authors. Coming from the academic world, the public sector and non-governmental organisations (NGOs), they provide the latest views on ‘Global food security: ethical and legal challenges’.