Food, Geography of

Everyone needs to eat. This basic fact of life is complicated by the rich variety of social meanings and environmental practices associated with food. The result is a complex, almost bewildering, geography of food. Shelves at modern grocery stores around the world are stocked with a vast range of foods, including many exotic foods that were out of reach for most consumers less than a generation ago. At the same time, hunger haunts almost 1 billion people, mostly, but not exclusively, in the global South, while small and subsistence farmers find it harder to sustain their livelihoods amid intense international market competition. Food has been an important object of economic, political, and scientific calculation and manipulation in the long-term development of globalization, as well as ...