Editorial

The penultimate issue of Food, Culture & Society for 2024 brings together diverse articles that center on food studies yet explore the political and economic crises of our times – around food security, political dimensions of food domesticity, and what new technologies have done to the provision and cultural understanding of food.

Food banks and the gripping issues of food insecurity are addressed in the following articles: Shanahan on food and fear in early modern Ireland, Morsi on satirical cultural production about food shortages in Cuba and Egypt, Lohnes on changes in the food banking economy in the United States, Ranta et al. on the end of the food bank model and a move toward social supermarkets in the United Kingdom, and Benker on “stockpiling as resilience” strategies in the midst of the cost-of-living crisis.

The issue also tackles interest in food domesticity and its public and political dimensions in these articles: Poppi’s work in documenting counter-narratives to the sexist and heteronormative context that is characteristic of Italian food culture, Novo and Lozano-Cabedo’s study of typologies of political participation to understand food-based engagement in Spain, Park et al.’s contribution to the development of a community-based framework of food pedagogies in Australia, Beinart-Smollan’s exploration of community cookbooks to reflect critically on the role of South African Jewish women in the apartheid system, and Yamanouchi’s study of memories of food narratives from the descendants of Japanese migrants in Broome, Western Australia.

The final set of articles in this issue look at the intersection of food with old and new media technologies. This includes Bascuñan-Wiley and Brockway’s work on how migrant narratives are portrayed in food tour television, Crumo’s research on the use of food delivery apps by restaurants in Brazil during the COVID-19 pandemic, Sau-Wa Mak and Kai-Yan Poon’s study of how food influencers on social media are shaping political consumerism in an increasingly authoritarian Hong Kong society, Hammelman et al.’s close analysis on online reviews to unpack how migrant-owned restaurants and their neighborhoods are understood, and Cuykx et al.’s article on how recipients encounter food media across platforms.

This issue also reviews five recent books on food consumption, consumerism, and politics: Chocolate: How a New World Commodity Conquered Spanish Literature by Erin Alice Cowling; Bigger Fish to Fry: A Theory of Cooking as Risk with Greek Examples by David Sutton; Cheffes de Cuisine by Rachel E. Black; A Decent Meal: Building Empathy in a Divided America by Michael Carolan; and Everyday Food Practices: Commercialisation and Consumption in the Periphery of the Global North, by Tarunna Sebastian.