The Routledge Handbook of Landscape and Food

This is a large academic edited collection that seeks to span the entire range of landscape studies and food studies, and to explore the areas in which they are mutually constituted. It is intended as a first port-of-call for researchers seeking to work in the emerging and growing field of landscape and food studies.

This volume brings together over fifty contributors from around the world in forty profoundly interdisciplinary chapters. Chapter authors represent an astonishing range of disciplines, from agronomy, anthropology, archaeology, conservation, countryside management, cultural studies, ecology, ethics, geography, heritage studies, landscape architecture, landscape management and planning, literature, urban design and architecture. Both food studies and landscape studies defy comprehension from the perspective of a single discipline, and thus such a range is both necessary and enriching.

The Routledge Handbook of Landscape and Food is intended as a first port of call for scholars and researchers seeking to undertake new work at the many intersections of landscape and food. Each chapter provides an authoritative overview, a broad range of pertinent readings and references, and seeks to identify areas where new research is needed—though these may also be identified in the many fertile areas in which subjects and chapters overlap within the book.

The book was conceived due to the frustration that Joshua Zeunert and I both felt when telling people we worked with food and landscape: people would automatically assume we meant allotment gardening, when in fact we were referring to topics as wide ranging as infrastructure and food systems, climate change, taste and foodways, and many more topics. Our book has been significant in defining this important nexus of research. Allen S. Weiss puts it better than we could: "Waterman and Zeunert have edited an exemplary interdisciplinary volume of great topical scope and profound conceptual depth. From landscape to seascape, Neolithic and Aboriginal to modern and globalized, the ecological to the utopian, The Routledge Handbook of Landscape and Food offers culinary wisdom, sociological analysis and ethical guidance. It is an indispensable book which promises to inaugurate a new epoch of both culinary and landscape studies."