Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue contributes to the topic/debate of the interlinkages between past and present food production systems with a special focus on how this impacts food sustainability and resilience of local food production. It is of interest to see how current food production systems are related to pre-colonial ones, what the factors of reduction or increase in food diversity and sustainability are, as well as what the impacts of these changes on wellbeing and health, and economic and social relations such as labor and gender are. Thus, contributions from different disciplines such as social anthropology, public health and epidemiology, archaeology, etc. are welcome. We are interested in seeing how local ecological knowledge of food production systems in contemporary situations can still be enhanced and how different local actors engage in such a situation.

We argue that while in the beginning of colonialization, new foods increased diversity, this changes with the urban and market-oriented agro-industrial food production, which lowers diversity. Furthermore, these changes in dietary pattern are reflected in nutritional outcomes and are paralleled by major changes in health status that can be both positive and negative. Strategies to upkeep diversity and lower vulnerability have been reduced by institutional transformations from common property to private and state property and open access of natural resources. This undermines the seasonal and cyclical production and accessibility of food in rural areas and might also negatively affect resilience and sustainability of local food production, especially under situations of local political, economic, and climate crises.

From a social–anthropological, new institutionalist, political ecology, and food systems theory perspective, which focus on regulatory aspects, relative prices and power relations, as well as discourse, narratives, and ideologies, this Special Issue calls for contributions analyzing changes in institutions for natural resources (such as agricultural land, water, wildlife, fish, plants, non-timber forest and veldt products, etc.) that provide the base of local food production systems and the impact on food sustainability. It also welcomes contributions that look at local perceptions and local traditional ecological knowledge as well as at changes in food security policies and their impacts on local food sustainability. This relates to contributions that show how agro-industrial transformation and agricultural investments (privatization) change local food production systems and food practices and preferences and other local dynamics such as power relations (gender, inter-ethnic relations etc.).

Another focus of interest is food insecurity, shifts in food availability, and access linked to different food systems and how local people use/activate/revitalize local traditional knowledge on foods/food production variation/conservation/storage (hunger foods, etc.) or invent/introduce new practices to cope with this situation and upkeep resilience and fight malnutrition.

Over the past two decades, the pace of dietary change appears to have accelerated in different regions of the world, such as a shift in consumption of basic staples toward more diversified diets. Today, a marked worldwide shift from traditional food regimes to a diet that is high in fat, sugar, processed foods, and low in fiber with corresponding increases in degenerative diseases is evident. From an epidemiological perspective, diet and nutritional status have undergone shifts in the broad patterns of food use, which has resulted in changes in stature, body composition, and patterns of disease. Thus, we welcome contributions on how changes in food consumption pattern and preferences has contributed to health status as food insecurity is associated with poorer health profiles including overweight, and obesity which are increasingly recognized as forms of malnutrition.

It also welcomes archaeological research reconstructing the history of agricultural and food practices in pre-historical and pre-colonial times and how variability, and possibly sustainability, have changed over time and influenced by post-colonial policies. This includes looking at how this is affecting local peoples’ use of different natural resources, such as plant uses. Have people switched to the collection of wild resources, are they using a diversified agricultural system of domesticated plants, or both? Related to this are attempts to understand how these changes and transformations could be tracked back to the past and how we could use the present to understand the past. By doing so, our understanding of past botanical remains by comparison through participation in daily activities of local people who still use “traditional” methods such as crop-processing and cooking practices can be improved. Hence, our understanding of archaeobotanical assemblages and archaeology of food is enhanced through careful observations of modern processes which create such assemblages that we may find archaeologically.

Dr. Désirée Gmür
Prof. Dr. Tobias Haller
Dr. Louis Champion
Guest Editors

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• food sustainability
• food resilience
• food systems
• food security
• food consumption
• food security state policies
• global dynamics of food production
• malnutrition
• natural resource management systems and food security
• institutional changes and food sustainability
• landscape evolution
• agro-industrial transformations
• sustainable diets
• local foods
• archaeology of food
• archaeobotany