This book focuses on food policy, and its relationship to public health, as an increasingly important issue in today’s society. Contributors highlight the lack of global regulation in the food supply chain and explore the common tendency to leave regulation to markets and to individual consumer decisions. In a period where there is growing concern about the sustainability of contemporary food systems, this book considers the inadequate response made to issues of food waste where solutions in high income countries are dependent on lifestyle and consumer behaviour. It offers an insight in to the importance of people’s everyday lives in relation to policies on public health, food and sustainability. The text demonstrates the corrosive impact of social inequality, and the futility of identifying lower income consumers as flawed when aiming for food policies that seek to achieve improvements in public health. Factors such as technological developments, ecological concerns and international trade are also taken in to account.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Critical Public Health.