Introduction to food : representations and meanings

The contributions in this Special Section draw on papers presented at the 2010 international conference on Food, Society and Public Health[1], organised by the British Sociological Association's Sociology of Food study group[2]. This was the second conference organised by the group and both events have attracted a multi-disciplinary audience from across the academic, research, policy and practice sectors. A key theme for debate in 2010 was what food means and what it represents which are central planks within the field of the sociology of food.