Food has, for most of our species history, been intensely political: who gets to eat what, how often, and through what means? The scale of polity in question has shifted over time, from very local institutions dividing up grain piles to an international community imagined in the Millennium Development Goals of the United Nations. Simultaneously, the numbers and interests of people asserting political stakes in food and agriculture have likewise shifted up and out. Global networks advocate social justice in distal agrarian systems, promotion of some farming techniques and prohibition of others, food sovereignty or efficiencies of markets and trade. Political consumerism allows the well-endowed to "vote with their dollars" for changes in food systems far from home, but depends on certification and labeling from unseen institutions. As an object of governmentality, food has never been so prominent.
The thirty-five handbook chapters confront four major themes in the politics of food: property, technology, justice and knowledge. Ronald Herring's editorial introduction asks how food is political, highlighting contention around the role of market, state and information in societal decisions. The first section of the handbook then examines technology, science and knowledge in food production. What is known - and disputed - about malnutrition, poverty and food security? The second section addresses ethics, rights and distributive justice: agrarian reform, gender inequality, entitlements and subsidies, and the social vision of the alternative food movement. The third section looks to intersections of agriculture and nature: wild foods, livestock, agro-ecological approaches to sustainability, and climate change and genetic engineering. The fourth section addresses food values and culture: political consumerism, labeling and certification, the science and cultural politics of food safety, values driving regulation of genetically modified foods and potential coexistence of GMOs, and organic and conventional crops. The fifth and final section looks at frontiers of global contentions: rival transnational advocacy networks, social movements for organic farming, the who and why of international land grabbing, junctures of cosmopolitan and local food narratives, the "supermarket revolution" and the international agrifood industry in low-income countries, and politics of knowledge in agricultural futures.

List of Contributors
Introduction: Food, Politics, and Society
1. How is Food Political? Market, State, and Knowledge
Ronald J. Herring
Part I Production: Technology, Knowledge, and Politics
2. Science, Politics, and the Framing of Modern Agricultural Technologies
John Harriss, Drew Stewart
3. Genetically Improved Crops
Martina Newell-McGloughlin
4. Agroecological Intensification of Smallholder Farming
Rebecca Nelson, Richard Coe
5. The Hardest Case: What Blocks Improvements in Agriculture in Africa?
Robert L. Paarlberg
6. The Poor, Malnutrition, Biofortification, and Biotechnology
Alexander Stein
7. Biofuels: Competition for Land, Resources, and Political Subsidies
David Pimentel, Michael Burgess
8. Alternative Paths to Food Security
Norman Uphoff
Part II Normative Knowledge: Ethics, Rights, and Distributive Justice
9. Ethics of Food Production and Consumption
Michiel Korthals
10. Food, Justice, and Land
Saturnino M. Borras Jr., Jennifer C. Franco
11. Food Security, Productivity, and Gender Inequality
Bina Agarwal
12. Delivering Food Subsidy: The State and the Market
Ashok Kotwal, Bharat Ramaswami
13. Diets, Nutrition, and Poverty: Lessons from India
Raghav Gaiha, Raghbendra Jha, Vani S. Kulkarni, Nidhi Kaicker
14. Food Price and Trade Policy Biases: Inefficient, Inequitable, yet not Inevitable
Kym Anderson
15. Intellectual Property Rights and the Politics of Food
Krishna Ravi Srinivas
16. Is Food the Answer to Malnutrition
David E. Sahn
Part III Nature: Food, Agriculture, and the Environment
17. Fighting Mother Nature with Biotechnology
Alan McHughen
18. Climate Change and Agriculture: Countering Doomsday Scenarios
Derrill D. Watson II
19. Wild Foods
Jules Pretty, Zareen Bharucha
20. Livestock in the Food Debate
Purvi Mehta-Bhatt, Paolo Ficarelli
21. The Social Vision of the Alternative Food Movement
Siddhartha Shome
Part IV Food Values: Ideas, Interests, and Culture
22. Food Values Beyond Nutrition
Ann Grodzins Gold
23. Cultural Politics of Food Safety: Genetically Modified Food in Japan, France, and the United States
Kyoko Sato
24. Food Safety
Bruce Chassy
25. The Politics of Food Labeling and Certification
Emily Clough
26. The Politics of Grocery Shopping: Eating, Voting, and (Possibly) Transforming the Food System
Josée Johnston, Norah MacKendrick
27. The Political Economy of Regulation of Biotechnology in Agriculture
Gregory D. Graff, Gal Hochman, David Zilberman
28. Coexistence in the Fields? GM, Organic, and Conventional Food Crops
Janice Thies
Part V Global Meets Local: Contestations, Movements, and Expertise
29. Global Movements for Food Justice
M. Jahi Chappell
30. The Rise of the Organic Foods Movement as a Transnational Phenomenon
Tomas Larsson
31. Global Meets Local in Food Narratives: The Case of the Thai Papaya
Sarah Davidson Evanega, Mark Lynas
32. Thinking the African Food Crisis: The Sahel Forty Years On
Michael J. Watts
33. Transformation of the Agrifood Industry in Developing Countries
Thomas Reardon, C. Peter Timmer
34. The Twenty-first Century Agricultural Land Rush
Gregory Thaler
35. Agricultural Futures: The Politics of Knowledge
Ian Scoones
Index

Ronald J. Herring is Professor of Government and International Professor of Agriculture and Rural Development at Cornell University.