Editorial

In third issue of Food, Culture & Society for 2024, we explore food and identity from a historical perspective in Pagani’s study of how nineteenth-century Italian children’s writer Collodi portrayed food in a school book, how such an exploration intersects with the evolution of domestic technologies in Apple’s work on a recipe box collected by Winifred Kowalke of Madison, Wisconsin, in the first half of the 20th century, and the continuities as well as changes in recommendations for dishes to British households between 1968-2016 in Warde and Hirth’s evocative article. Food on university campuses and related issues of food (in)security is another dominant theme in this issue and explored by: Villegas et al.’s examination of food insecurity stigma among students at a university in California’s Inland Empire and how this may be a by-product of neoliberal discourses, Dickinson’s in-depth study of missing meals on campus by highly mobile college students at City University of New York, Thompson and Carter’s work on rural studies can benefit by integrating food justice research, Stevens and Ruperti’s article on the growth of novel food companies in Singapore to address food security, and Kesselman’s exploration of using the decolonization and food sovereignty lens to re-frame the food crisis in the South African context.

The issue also tackles long-standing interest in food and sociality in the following articles: Middleton et al.’s research on how ‘lunch clubs’ facilitated by ethnic-focused organisations in South Australia help combat social isolation for older migrant individuals, Starck and Matta’s work on how assemblages of food, people, material objects, and their individual and collective affordances help improve the living conditions of new migrants in Germany, and Ferrant et al.’s article on the social varieties of eating out through a comparison of the cities of Santiago in Chile and Paris in France. The two nutrition-focus articles included in this issue are McNeely et al.’s examination of how religious affiliation can impact food pantries, and Bui et al.’s study of menu items in Vietnamese restaurants in Seoul.

This issue has three open access articles that also reflect the above mentioned themes: Jones and Jallinoja’s surey analysis work on the appeal on alternative diets in Finland, O’Hagan’s investigation of the early marketing practices of Postum in Sweden that capitalised on people’s fears around coffee, and Vezovnik’s close reading of five western food documentaries that focus on meat production.

Finally, the issue reviews five important recent books on various aspects of food politics and practices: Gerardo Otero’s The Neoliberal Die, Paul Freedman’s Why Food Matters, Eating Traditional Food: Politics, Identity and Practices (edited by Brigitte Sebastia), Sarah E. Worth’s Taste: A Philosophy of Food, and Martha Lloyd’s Household Book: The Original Manuscript from Jane Austen’s Kitchen.