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Nutrition-sensitive, food-based approaches towards hunger and malnutrition are effective, sustainable and long-term solutions. Discussing the policy, strategic, methodological, technical and programmatic issues associated with such approaches, this book also provides practical lessons for advancing nutrition-sensitive, food-based approaches.

AbstractContract farming gained importance in many developing countries. While effects of contracting on smallholder farmers' incomes were analyzed in previous studies, diet and nutrition effects are not yet well understood. Here, we examine the effects of contract farming on dietary diversity and child anthropometrics, using survey data from the palm oil sector in Ghana. Contracting improves smallholder nutrition, but the effects vary by contract type. We distinguish between marketing contracts and resource‐providing contracts that affect household labor use and gender roles differently. For both contract types, contracting female farmers has larger positive child nutrition effects than contracting male farmers.

Ensuring optimal diets and nutrition for the global population is a grand challenge fraught with many contentious issues. To achieve food security for all and protect health, we need functional, equitable, and sustainable food systems. Food systems are highly complex networks of individuals and institutions that depend on governance and policy leadership. This book explains how interconnected food systems and policies affect diets and nutrition in high-, middle-, and low-income countries. In tandem with food policy, food systems determine the availability, affordability, and nutritional quality of the food supply, which influences the diets that people are willing and able to consume. Readers will become familiar with both domestic and international food policy processes and actors, and they will be able to critically analyze and debate how policy and science affect diet and nutrition outcomes.

Chapter 1. Food Systems, Food Environments, and Consumer Behavior -- Chapter 2. Food Policy -- Chapter 3. Nutritious Foods, Healthy Diets, and Contributions to Health -- Chapter 4. The Multiple Burdens of Malnutrition -- Chapter 5. Transformations Across Diets and Food Systems -- Chapter 6. Drivers Shaping Food Systems -- Chapter 7. Policies Affecting Food Supply Chains -- Chapter 8. Policies Affecting Food Environments and Consumer Behavior -- Chapter 9. Sustainable Diets – Aligning Food Systems and the Environment -- Chapter 10. The Future of Food – Shaping Diets and Nutrition.

AbstractWidespread inequities in diet and nutrition present a pressing public health problem. Sociologists working to illuminate the causes and contours of these inequities often center the role of family foodwork, or the multifaceted domestic labor that supports eating, including planning and preparing meals. Mounting sociological scholarship on foodwork considers how food's meanings are socially patterned to reflect broader social structures, ideologies and institutions that influence their manifestation and families' resources to enact them. Here, we present three core contributions from the sociology of foodwork that can advance essential transdisciplinary conversations around nutrition disparities as well as efforts to tackle these disparities. We lay out how (1) family foodwork is historically rooted in broader structures of capitalist exploitation and women's subordination, and today remains gendered through normative discourses equating "good" feeding with "good" mothering; (2) the moralization of foodwork is buttressed by an ideological context idealizing homecooked meals and lamenting foodwork's decline, and; (3) foodwork—and societal evaluations of it—are shaped and stratified by intersecting gendered, classed, and racial inequalities. After reviewing each contribution and its importance for addressing nutrition inequities, we conclude by advocating for a closer conversation across disciplines and highlighting important future directions for sociologists.

Using parish-level information from Sir F.M. Eden's The state of the poor (1797) we can identify typical diets for the counties of England. These diets varied considerably and afforded very different standards of nutrition. We compute a nutritional score for this diet, paying attention to the presence of vitamins, minerals and micronutrients shown to be essential for health and growth in constructing this measure. Other information in the reports allows us to relate county-level nutrition to factors in the local economy. In particular we find nutrition was positively related to the availability of common land in the area and to women's remunerated work if conducted from home. Lack of common land and little local supply of dairy products also pushed households into buying white wheaten bread rather than baking their own wholemeal loaf. Replicating some of this analysis with household-level data confirms these results. Diet also maps onto stature: male convicts to Australia were significantly taller if they originated in a county with a more nutritious diet. This verifies the important impact of nutrition on stature and demonstrates the sensitivity of height as a measure of key aspects of welfare.

"Miscellaneous, no. 18, 1916" is a report by Dr. A. E. Taylor, of the U. S. embassy at Berlin, on conditions of diet and nutrition at Ruhleben; two supplementary reports are included in the present correspondence between Sir Edward Grey and Mr. Page. ; Parliament. Papers by command. Cd. 8262. ; Mode of access: Internet.

This work was supported by funding from the Rural and Environment Science and Analytical Services Division (RESAS) programme of the Scottish Government. RESAS had no role in the design, analysis or writing of this article. ; Peer reviewed ; Postprint