Food and Public Health : Contemporary Issues and Future Directions

This book focuses on food policy, and its relationship to public health, as an increasingly important issue in today’s society. Contributors highlight the lack of global regulation in the food supply chain and explore the common tendency to leave regulation to markets and to individual consumer decisions. In a period where there is growing concern about the sustainability of contemporary food systems, this book considers the inadequate response made to issues of food waste where solutions in high income countries are dependent on lifestyle and consumer behaviour. It offers an insight in to the importance of people’s everyday lives in relation to policies on public health, food and sustainability. The text demonstrates the corrosive impact of social inequality, and the futility of identifying lower income consumers as flawed when aiming for food policies that seek to achieve improvements in public health. Factors such as technological developments, ecological concerns and international trade are also taken in to account.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Critical Public Health.

Dr Wendy Wills is Reader in Food and Public Health in the Centre for Research for Primary and Community Care (CRIPACC) at the University of Hertfordshire, UK. She is a sociologist and public health nutritionist.

Dr Alizon Draper is a Reader in public health nutrition at the University of Westminster, UK. She has a background in social anthropology and her work has focused on the social and policy aspects of nutrition.

Dr Ulla Gustafsson is a Principal Lecturer at Roehampton University, UK. She is a medical sociologist with interests in food policy, public health, school meals and young people’s career and education choices.