Good food means different things to different people, but in this book it is understood to mean food that is appetising, nutritious, culturally appropriate and sustainably produced. Seldom is good food associated with public canteens in schools, hospitals and prisons. While pupils, patients and prisoners are clearly very different people, they nevertheless have one thing in common: they are all highly vulnerable people whose well-being depends on a nutritious diet. Because of its unique role in sustaining life, food is the universally accepted index of our capacity to care for ourselves and for others. The introduction sets the scene for the book by focusing on the problems that good food provisioning can help to solve: the problems of climate change, poverty and hunger. Sustainable diets are part of the solution to these problems if we can provide ‘win-win’ diets that are good for people and planet alike. But while the relief of hunger has the greatest claim on our moral sensibilities, the good food agenda can’t be reduced to a single issue because, by its very nature, food has a multifunctional character. Therefore, we need to resist the temptation to reduce the meaning of ‘good food’ to a narrow nutritional agenda since a purely needs-based perspective cannot do justice to the kaleidoscopic character of our food and the multiple prisms – social, economic, political, ecological, cultural, physiological, psychological – through which food is viewed, valued and used in society.