Issue #2: Food Forward

This is the second print issue of Science Politics. Our first considered the future of development after the rupture of the United States international aid agency: what caused it, what happened in its aftermath around the world, and what the path forward is. This issue turns to food. At a moment when culture and politics in the U.S are colliding to produce not only new policies but new ideas about what is good for us, the politics of food felt urgent. We are honored to open the collection with a foreword by Marion Nestle.

The essays are organized in three parts:

First, we ask who decides what we eat, and why. Our contributors examine the cultural assumptions behind the New Food Pyramid and what counts as real food, superfoods that are repackaged as gummies and powders, the double standard applied to scientific evidence, and what the United Kingdom’s approach reveals about real reform.

Second, we consider the systems that feed us, and how decades of policy and trade have shaped what farmers grow. How do global policies shape the way people experience food, and how does that experience reach their families? Our contributors examine agricultural policy in India, the plantation frontier in West Papua, and the legacy of NAFTA in North America.

Finally, we turn to the hands that feed us. We consider how the global food system creates risk and insecurity for so many workers, and we suggest a better way forward.