The food system and human security: Nutrition, sustainability and food safety in a time of global change

This study examines the threats and vulnerabilities of the emerging network of global food systems to characterize present challenges to food security. By analyzing the issues of nutrition, food safety, and global environmental change, I consider how processes of globalization are reshaping food systems in ways that have significant impacts for human and national security. This dissertation seeks to identify the constitutive parts of an ethical and environmentally sustainable network of global food systems that is able to provide all people with the food they need for a healthy life.;The present study seeks to provide a deeper, richer, and broader discussion of food security challenges by adopting a human security perspective that considers sudden and chronic causes of insecurity through three in-depth qualitative case studies of primary sets of challenges to food security: optimizing nutrition, ensuring food safety, and managing global environmental change. This project's operation at multiple levels of analysis and its use of knowledge from multiple disciplinary perspectives makes it ideal for using a social ecology approach that can provide a bridge between efforts that examine the social aspects of the food system and efforts that consider the natural and environmental dimensions of the food systems. Finally, the study utilizes the concept of sustainable development to connect the energy and vitality of food security efforts that seek to provide for present and future human needs.;The project argues that a key current challenge for politics and international relations is to more completely understand the ways we can maximize global networks to enhance human health, livelihoods, and well-being, while also finding ways to reduce the sources of insecurity they introduce and amplify. The research undertaken is both substantively significant, as questions of food security continue to be persistent sources of human insecurity, and theoretically significant, as questions about food security can provide valuable insight into the challenges of governing in an increasingly globalized and networked world.