Tim Lang, David Barling and Martin Caraher. 2009. Oxford University Press. US $53.95 Hardback, ISBN-10: OA856788X.
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Food Policy provides a concise, accessible, yet comprehensive look at the high-profile issues that surround the production, distribution, and consumption of food. Building on previous work in this area, Tim Lang and his colleagues at London's City University focus their analysis on the components of food policy, sharing their experience, research, and thinking on the multiple layers and levels of public and private action that together make up the food policy world.
The book is not a complete history or a comprehensive review of all aspects of food policy. Instead, it provides the reader with a guided tour through the elements that, the authors argue, are all equally important to the establishment of better (read healthier, more environmentally friendly, and socially responsible) food policy. The book looks at nutrition, consumer behaviors, natural resource management, market structures and market power, corporate behavior, and public education campaigns, each time detailing the failures and arguing for a more integrated approach to food policy, which they deem an “ecological public health” approach. To make their point, the authors draw on the world of “sustainable development,” a world that lacks analytical precision but that embraces complexity and insists that social, ecological, political, and economic goals should not be pursued in isolation from each other.
Food policy analysts must look at dozens of disciplines to do their job. Food policy is parceled out among many different government departments and ministries, a confusion that, as the authors discuss, is echoed at the local and the global levels and in both the private and public sectors. Food policy is necessarily complex, say the authors, and it therefore deserves a dedicated home. The book makes a compelling and detailed argument for this case.
To realize substantial and significant change requires more than the best possible thinking. The authors argue that even the best analysis does not necessarily create the right policy changes—historically, radical reform of food policy has often come at times of war or severe economic dislocation. Today, the moment arises because of the confluence of crises surrounding food. Production is under intense new stresses related to changing weather patterns and climate change, depleted and polluted natural resources (especially water), and competition for land to satisfy demand for food, feed, and fuel. Consumption, too, faces new and urgent challenges, as the incidence of diet-related noncommunicable disease continues to grow at an alarming rate and as consumers start to ask more questions about what they eat (Is my food safe? Nutritious? Was it grown on what used to be rainforest? Was the farmer paid a fair price?). The trend toward centralizing (and globalizing) food distribution and retail systems also continues apace.
The book provides an overview of this turbulence in the food policy world and the opportunities and challenges it creates. It serves as an introduction to the latest thinking on food policy, as well as some history and context for today's debates. The chapters offer a guided tour of some half dozen public policy areas that together make up the larger whole of food policy, including governance, nutrition and health, supply chains, the environment and ecological issues, consumer behaviors and culture, and social justice. The reader may find herself, however, looking for a working model or more concrete description of how an ecological public health approach to food policy might be applied to a particular problem or situation.
The book provides a number of excellent visual tools, such as diagrams, flowcharts, and matrices that synthesize information and provide a picture of how an issue or policy has evolved. It is also closely referenced; there is an index and each chapter has a rich list of references that offer readers the chance to look more deeply at the debates and ideas discussed.
The book will especially appeal to an academic audience (it would be an excellent central text for a course on food policy, for example). The authors make a persuasive case—using the writers’ own experiences, the historical record, and citing hundreds of works by authors and analysts— that food policy has come of age, that it needs the urgent attention of policy-makers at the highest levels, and that efforts to address the challenges we face will need to be a coherent effort from local through national to global authorities.
Anyone who cares about the state of our food systems and the problems they have generated, however, will find value in reading the book. They will be rewarded with good arguments for change and a strengthened conviction that change is possible.
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