This original collection abandons culinary nostalgia and the cataloguing of regional cuisines to examine the role of food and food marketing in constructing culture, consumer behavior, and national identity.

What do deep fried mars bars, cod, and Bulgarian yoghurt have in common? Each have become symbolic foods with specific connotations, located to a very specific place and country. This book explores the role of food in society as a means of interrogating the concept of the nation-state and its sub-units, and reveals how the nation-state in its various disguises has been and is changing in response to accelerated globalisation. The chapters investigate various stages of national food: its birth, emergence, and decline, and why sometimes no national food emerges. By collecting and analysing a wide range of case studies from countries including Portugal, Mexico, the USA, Bulgaria, Scotland, and Israel, the book illustrates ways in which various social forces work together to shape social and political realities concerning food. The contributors, hailing from anthropology, history, sociology and political science, investigate the significance of specific food cultures, cuisines, dishes, and ingredients, and their association with national identity. In so doing, it becomes clearer how these two things interact, and demonstrates the scope and direction of the current study of food and nationalism.

At a time when the relationship between 'the country' and 'the city' is in flux worldwide, the value and meanings of food associated with both places continue to be debated. Building upon the foundation of Raymond Williams' classic work, The Country and the City, this volume examines how conceptions of the country and the city invoked in relation to food not only reflect their changing relationship but have also been used to alter the very dynamics through which countryside and cities, and the food grown and eaten within them, are produced and sustained. Leading scholars in the study of food offer ethnographic studies of peasant homesteads, family farms, community gardens, state food industries, transnational supermarkets, planning offices, tourist boards, and government ministries in locales across the globe. This fascinating collection provides vital new insight into the contested dynamics of food and will be key reading for upper-level students and scholars of food studies, anthropology, history and geography.

Building and expanding on the first edition, the second edition of Food, National Identity and Nationalism continues to explore a much-neglected area study: the relationship between food and nationalism. With a preface written by Michaela DeSoucey and using a wide range of case studies, it demonstrates that food and nationalism is an important area to study, and that the food-nationalism axis provides a useful prism through which to explore and analyse the world around us, from the everyday to the global, and the ways in which it affects us. The second edition includes a number of new case studies, including the demise and resurrection of pie as a ‘national dish’ in post-Brexit Britain; the use of netnography; the role of diasporas in maintaining and reinventing national food; the gastrodiplomatic potential of the New Nordic Cuisine; the potential of veganism to transcend nationalism; and the relationship between gastronationalism and populism.

Abstract: Of the 94 developing nations, 24 are categorized as rapid-growth, where food production expanded faster than population. In a study of 16 rapid-growth countries, wide variation was evident in sources of growth, patterns of growth, patterns of agricultural and economic development, geography, demography, and income level. Population growth and income are significant in raising demand for a wide variety of staple foods, resulting in increased production and importation. Main crops varied by region: maize in South America, wheat in the Middle East, and rice in Asia. Production increase is based on area expansion and output per hectare, and reflects changing crop patterns as well as new technology in fertilization and irrigation. Approaches to increasing the world food supply must take into account physical and economic conditions and potential problems, such as soil management.

The Overview of Food Security in the Countries of the Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO) provides a comprehensive review of the current status of food security in the region, highlighting the characteristics of food security, trends, challenges and recommendations. The publication brings together the latest and reliable data to provide the most up-to-date food security overview of the ECO region. The completion of the publication will also provide a timely opportunity to update the Regional Food Security Programme of ECO which was developed in 2008.

The purpose of this paper is to update the information on net food importing countries, using different definitions of food, separating countries by their level of income, whether they are in conflict and whether they are significant oil exporters. The study also estimates the changes in net food importing status of these countries over the past two and a half decades, and, most important, the study measures the relative importance of these food imports in the import bask of the countries. Our results show that while many low-income countries are net food importers, the importance and potential impact of the net food importing status has been highly exaggerated. Many low-income countries that have larger food deficits are either oil exporters or countries in conflict. Food deficits of most low-income countries are not that significant as a percentage of their imports. Our results show that only 6 low-income countries have food deficits that are more than 10 percent of their imports. Last two decades have seen a significant improvement in food trade balances of low-income developing countries. SSA low-income countries are an exception to this trend. On the other hand, there are a group of countries which are experiencing civil conflicts which are large importers of food, and these countries can not meet their basic needs. They also need special assistance in the distribution of food within their boundaries. Therefore, one should modify the WTO Ministerial Declaration, and focus on these conflict countries rather than the broad net food importers.