In recent years food studies scholarship has tended to focus on a number of increasingly abstract, largely unquestioned concepts, in particular with regard to how capital, markets and states organize and operate. This has led to a gulf between public policy and the realities of food as experienced by people in homes and on the streets. Through grounded case studies in seven Latin American countries, each of which seeks to explain development as it uniquely unfolds, this book explores how social change in food and agriculture is fundamentally experiential, contingent and unpredictable.

In recent years food studies scholarship has tended to focus on a number of increasingly abstract, largely unquestioned concepts, in particular with regard to how capital, markets and states organize and operate. This has led to a gulf between public policy and the realities of food as experienced by people in homes and on the streets. Through grounded case studies in seven Latin American countries, each of which seeks to explain development as it uniquely unfolds, this book explores how social change in food and agriculture is fundamentally experiential, contingent and unpredictable.