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This chapter presents an overview of food policy. It describes the disciplines that offer insights and stake claims on food policy. It discusses four phases in the development of food policy covering the 1940s and 1950s, the 1970s, the 1980s–2000s, and the 21st century. It identifies six cross-cutting food policy goals emerging that are essential to addressing ecological public health. These are (i) achieving sufficiency of production on ecological terms; (ii) preventing diet-related ill-health (within a sustainable food supply); (iii) harnessing all sciences to address the nature of production; (iv) lowering food's impact on the environment; (v) achieving international development and social justice; and (vi) food democracy.

This chapter addresses various issues arising from the estimation of income elasticities of energy and nutrients using different types of data from developing countries. While it is reasonable to expect that food consumption depends on habit persistence and individuals' requirements, most microeconomic studies have not addressed these issues in detail. Moreover, from a food policy standpoint, it is important to investigate how diets change with household incomes in developing countries.

This chapter resumes a discussion about food poverty and hunger, topics which have generated policy action throughout the 20th century. It focuses on how food policy, informed by an ecological public health perspective, might interpret the problem. For the present purposes, famine is used to refer to extreme events and food poverty to persistent underconsumption. There is hunger and injustice in both. Both reflect challenges and failings of contemporary food systems.

This chapter draws on academic studies of the public policy process to identify some key concepts that have been deployed to aid understanding of the making and implementation of public policy, and the factors that might contribute to its final form and features. The key concepts that are introduced to this modern conception of food policy are the notions of power relationships, historical institutionalism, governance, governmentality, policy networks and multi-level governance. The nature of the contemporary governance of food in relation to, and under, the “rule” of public policy is then examined and explained.

This introductory chapter begins with a brief discussion of changes in food consumption patterns in various countries. It then discusses economic factors and energy and micronutrient deficiencies in developing countries, food policies and children's physical and mental development in developing countries, nutritional status and labour productivity in developing countries, and diet and obesity in developed countries. An overview of subsequent chapters is presented.

This chapter explores how and why the food system has the shape it does, in order to assess whether and how the various food sectors are rising to the ecological public health challenge; and if not, how to encourage or make them do so. For decades, food producers have been locked into demands to increase output and to produce whatever they do more cheaply. Now, from health, environmental and societal interests, different urgent messages emanate, but can food businesses engage? Some argue that they can and must, which others claim that they cannot and are locked-in.

This introductory chapter begins with a description of the book's main thesis and objectives. The book is structured around a number of core problems in food policy: governance, supply chain, nutrition and health, environment, behaviour and culture, social justice and poverty. When scrutinizing these in turn, the book explores a number of key cross-cutting themes. Each proposes an argument or concern that is either already central to food policy discourse or looks set to be so. An overview of the subsequent chapters is presented.

This chapter focuses on the behavioural and cultural aspects of food. It argues that food behaviour can be located within a social process in which consumers are but one set of actors in the food system, and where contexts and social interactions may be set and inherited through wider culture, geography and history, as well as family or domestic circumstance. Policies are engaged with all these levels, factors, and drivers.

This chapter reiterates the major themes and findings from the book and points to the need for further research on food policy issues. It argues that with respect to the design of food and health policies, the demarcations between disciplines such as economics, nutrition, psychology, epidemiology, and public health are superficial and may even be counter-productive. Multi-disciplinary research can narrow the differences between disciplines, provided that researchers agree on a set of assumptions that reflect salient aspects of the problems under study. Multi-disciplinary teams are an efficient way of conducting and disseminating research for the design of food and health policies.

This chapter draws out the implications of the analytical and empirical narratives of the first nine chapters. It focuses on the conditions under which food safety policy making, and science-based risk policy-making more generally, might achieve and reconcile scientific and democratic legitimacy.

This chapter presents an account of the reform of food safety policy-making institutions and practices, which were introduced in response to the crises that followed 20 March 1996 in the UK, at the European Commission, in France, and in Germany. It presents a comparison between the UK Food Standards Agency, the European Food Safety Authority, the Agence Française de la Sécurité Sanitaire des Aliments, and the Federal Office for Consumer Protection and Food Safety (or Bundesamt für Verbraucherschutz und Lebensmittel Sicherheit) and the Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (Bundesinstitut für Risikobewertung or BfR) in Germany.

This chapter examines efforts to reduce inequalities in food and nutrition in Great Britain since the late 1990s. In investigates how problems in food and nutrition inequalities have constructed and measured and provides data on social inequalities in food and nutritional intakes and outcomes, focusing largely on income and occupationally based inequalities. It discusses the location of the Acheson Inquiry within the food and nutrition policy context of the time and outlines contemporary anxieties and activities in relation to inequalities in food and nutrition.

One of the concerns of this book is with government policies towards food and other agricultural goods, and with how a government treats producers in the rural sector and consumers in the urban sector. Governments – both in LDCs (less developed countries) and in several developed countries – play an active role in setting food prices received by farmers and the food prices paid by city-dwellers. Therefore, it is important to identify what are the salient characteristics of LDCs relevant to such policies, what the stated objectives of these policies are, and what the alternative instruments at a government’s disposal are for attaining these objectives. Accordingly, as a basis for the methods used in the book, this chapter addresses the stated objectives of food-related policies, puts agricultural policies in perspective, and gives an account of the economic structure of LDCs.

This chapter looks at how health impact assessment (HIA) has been applied to agricultural and food policies internationally and discusses whether it is a useful tool for raising broader public health issues on the agricultural and food policy agenda. It briefly reviews the different approaches that have been used, and draws some conclusions about the strengths and weaknesses of each for improving health considerations in this policy sector.

This chapter responds to the collective case made in Chapters 1–8 for reconceptualizing food policy around ecological public health. It proposes that food policy gains renewed clarity of purpose if it adopts the perspective of ecological public health but that structural challenges are awesome. The themes introduced in this present chapter are woven throughout.