Introduction to Elgar Encyclopedia of Food and Society

This introduction to the Elgar Encyclopedia of Food and Society provides an overview of the editors' intentions and approach to creating the volume. Recent years have seen a rapid expansion of interest in studies of the relationships between food and society, covering a highly diverse range of thematic and empirical perspectives and engaging with many of the key issues of our time, including the climate emergency, global inequalities and the persistence of poverty alongside wealth, and imbalances of power at global and local scales. The introduction contextualises the volume's entries by commenting on how food-society relationships have been studied, the approach and underlying principles that informed the editors' thinking, their aims and intentions for the encyclopedia and the process of putting the volume together, and, finally, on how the encyclopedia can be used.