This book is about the food people eat, the conditionsunder which it is produced and what is done to itbefore it is bought and consumed. It is about theway food is regulated, poorly regulated or in needof regulation. It involves questions of governance,how problems involving foodstuffs and food processesare enforced, ineffectively enforced or not enforcedat all. From this perspective, this book encompassesan understanding of food crimes and harms beyondlegalistic anthropocentric definitions. This entailsa critical contextualisation of humanity'srelationship to food, and questions many phenomena,including the role of speciesism and socialinequalities among various actors within the foodindustry, the commodification of food and thegreenwashing of its marketing, and the consequencesof changing agricultural techniques and foodtechnologies on humans, non-human animals and theenvironment. Above all else, this book is aboutfood crime.

While the study of the legal regulation of food hasbeen subjected to prolonged study by sociologistsand legal experts for more than a century (seePaulus, 1974), and there were some references tofood crime in the literature in purely legalcontexts (see Ponting, 2005), Hazel Croall (2007)was the first to attempt to offer a broader conceptof food crime that was not confined to legaldefinitions. She defined ‘food crime’ as a range ofcrimes involved in producing, distributing andselling foodstuffs. Food crime includes a wide rangeof offences:

Since then, articles on food crime have been publishedin various journals or included as chapters orsections within edited books focused on greencriminology, environmental crime, corporate crime,rural crime or similar topics (see, for example,Beirne and South, 2007; White, 2009; Sollund, 2015;Donnermeyer, 2016). However, in none of these wasfood crime made the primary focus – which is theobjective of this book.