Exploring Food Security Through the Culinary Footprint

Description

Written by a leading scholar on public health and food, this key text introduces a new core concept to fuel our understanding of contemporary food system: the culinary footprint. In the same way as the carbon footprint, this rubric provides a way of capturing the impact of household and individual food production and consumption trends upon international food security and sustainability. With the epidemic of food-related diseases, highly processed foods and global supply chains co-existing alongside our desire for nutritional, ethical and local foods, this is a timely reminder that we need to develop a more nuanced understanding of consumption, showing how global food chains and process influence how we eat and how individual demands can skew the wider agri-food systems. The linking of certain foods with nutrition or health qualities is now something we take for granted and yet Dixon demonstrates how this has a major economic and ecological effect upon the global food system by privileging certain foods and interests, putting the prospect of a long-term sustainable and food secure future under threat.

Jane Dixon is Senior Fellow at the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health, Australian National University, Australia. Her research takes place at the intersection of sociology and public health, and focuses on transformations within national and global food systems.