Exploring Food Security Through the Culinary Footprint

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.