This Modern Guide provides detailed theoretical and empirical insights into key areas of research in food economics. It takes a forward-looking perspective on how different actors in the food system shape the sustainability of food production, distribution, and consumption, as well as on major challenges to efficient and inclusive food systems. Analysing the main characteristics of modern food markets, chapters introduce readers to the economics of food systems, product differentiation, the mediating role of food retailers, and the increasing significance and complexity of international trade in food. Encapsulating new methods in the study of food economics and policy, this Modern Guide explores changes in food value chains and consumption. It further pushes the boundaries of food economics to include economic perspectives on the role of social media and technology such as genomics in shaping food systems. Offering key insights into the state-of-the-art debates in the field, this Modern Guide will be critical reading for graduate students and researchers of food economics. It will also be a timely book for practitioners in the field wishing to take a fresh look at issues shaping food systems.

The Perthshire I met in June 1962 was devoid of Motorways; steam trains still worked the branch lines and MOT tests for cars were far in the future. This story of my time with the Forestry Commission is really the sequence to my National Service in Germany that I wrote of in "Two Years" with the Pied Piper of Hameln. Forestry was changing; coal mining was scaling down and the labourintensive pit prop market was being replaced by the need for the more easily mechanised pulp wood to feed the new pulp mill outside Fort William. Timber Lorries were becoming both longer and heavier and the forest roads and bridges had to be strengthened to cope. The natural forests had been depleted by the demands of two world wars and the new forests planted on heather moors torn by tractors and giant ploughs. This was the world I worked in for eight years, and this is the story of the men and machines that made it possible.