The Oxford Handbook of
FOOD, POLITICS, AND SOCIETY

Even in unlimited pages, coverage of the scope of this Handbook would be implausible. We focus on intersections of food, politics, and society: the dimensions of food that
express both overt political action and deeper structural elements of political economy,
in societies of different scale, from villages to an imagined global community. That conceptual narrowing is helpful in exploring intersecting analytical puzzles: Why should
food be political? Why is food knowledge contested?
Michael Pollen tells us that society invariably has the right answers to food questions
through a mechanism called “culture,” which operationally reduces to “mom.”
“Culture, when it comes to food, is of course a fancy word for your mom.”
Mom knows what one needs to know about food in Pollan’s world, whatever the
machinations of the scientific-industrial complex built up around official nutritional
recommendations from the state.1 If your mom couldn’t pronounce the ingredients, or
if you can’t pronounce the ingredients, whatever claims are made for some food product, it has strayed too far from society’s evolutionary judgment of what constitutes “real
food.” Mom represents condensation of knowledge and norms of tradition.