Food is central to our identity. It helps us to define who we are, and our place in our home, our community and our world. It shapes the social interactions in which we engage, with our friends, with our families, and with our community. In so doing, food connects us, to ourselves and to each other. But contemporary access to food presents some of the most stark examples of human inequality that we witness on a regular basis. All of us need food to survive, day in and day out. Most of us want more from our food than just survival: we seek pleasure in taste, texture, smell and sight. We seek pleasure in sharing food with others. When we walk into a supermarket, we are confronted with a cornucopia of choice from around the world that enables us to seek this pleasure. Most of us have no idea where the food in the supermarket comes from, and most of us give this no thought, focusing merely upon what we need to acquire to seek the pleasure that we want to get from the food that we buy to eat.We know, of course, that many of us cannot afford to seek that pleasure from food and its sharing, and have to settle for surviving. We know that far too many in our communities cannot afford to make the choices that we can in a supermarket, having to rely upon the charity of food banks to survive. Indeed, many of us face profound difficulties in doing even that. We know that we live in a world in which unparalleled hunger can be found, in places both far and near, as too many simply don't get enough food.The world food system is designed to enable you to understand how our food system, with its unparalleled abundance and immense scarcity, came to be, unpacking the key factors shaping contemporary production, distribution, access to and consumption of food, both here and elsewhere. After all, if we want the world to become a better place it seems that a good place to start would be on our plates.

Latest episodes of the podcast The World Food System

• EP 07 An alternative food system? Agroecology PT 3: Examples of agroecology
• EP 07 An alternative food system? Agroecology PT 2: What is agroecology?
• EP 07 An alternative food system? Agroecology PT 1: Why not organic?
• EP 06 Crisis and the demand for food PT 4: COVID-19 and the corporate food regime
• EP 06 Crisis and the demand for food PT 3: Crisis in the supply of food
• EP 06 Crisis and the demand for food PT 2: Crisis and food prices
• EP 06 Crises in the corporate food regime PT 1: Crisis and food prices
• EP 05 The corporate food regime and financialization
• EP 04 The corporate food regime PT 5: The challenges of the corporate food regime
• EP 04 The corporate food regime PT 4: Monopoly power
• EP 04 The corporate food regime PT 3: Agri-food transnational corporations: supermarkets
• EP 04 The corporate food regime PT 2: Meatification
• EP 04 The corporate food regime PT 1: Characteristics of the corporate food regime
• EP 03 Regulating food trade PT 4: NAFTA and the USMCA
• EP 03 Regulating food trade PT 3: The Agreement on Agriculture
• EP 03 Regulating food trade PT 2: The World Trade Organization
• EP 03 Regulating food trade PT 1: Agri-food commodity chains
• EP 02 Food Regimes PT 5: Foundations of the contemporary world food system
• EP 02 Food Regimes PT 4: Impacts of the mercantile-industrial food regime
• EP 02 Food Regimes PT 3: The mercantile-industrial food regime
• EP 02 Food Regimes PT 2: The first food regime
• EP 02 Food regimes PT 1: The emergence of a world food system
• EP 01 Food security or food sovereignty PT 6: The contradictions of the world food system
• EP 01 Food security or food sovereignty PT 5: Who are the world's food insecure?
• EP 01 Food security or food sovereignty PT 4: Do we grow enough food?
• EP 01 Food security or food sovereignty PT 3: What is malnutrition?
• EP 01 Food security or food sovereignty PT 2: The first food regime
• EP 01 Food security or food sovereignty PT 1: The intimate commodity