Food: local challenges, global issues

Some parts of this selection, marked with an asterisk (*), have been updated to coincide with French agriculture week in February 2025.

Because of its vital and structuring character, food offers an excellent perspective for studying different human societies, their economic, political or normative organisation, but also the imaginary and beliefs materialised in what we eat.

If historians and anthropologists were among the first to take an interest in collective food habits, all the disciplines of human and social sciences are now questioning the way in which food is produced, transformed, preserved, exchanged, consumed and discarded, as well as the meaning given to these processes. More recently, a great deal of research is examining the local, even intimate, issues of food in a globalised economy marked by both eco-systemic crises and growing conflicts over and for food.

The library offers you a selection of books, articles, reports, podcasts, archive documents, etc., to borrow or consult from our subject guides:

• Law (FR) (*) ,
• Economics (FR)(*),
• History (FR) (*),
• Sociology (FR) (*),
• Humanities (FR),
• United Nations (FR), 
• Political Science (FR).