In recent years, the ways in which food is produced, distributed, and consumed have emerged as prominent health and social issues. With rising concern about rates of obesity, food systems have attracted the attention of state actors, leading to both innovative and controversial public health interventions, such as citywide soda bans, "veggie prescription" initiatives, and farm-to-school programs. At the same time, social movement activism has emerged focused on issues related to food and health, including movements for food justice, food safety, farm worker's rights, and community control of land for agricultural production. Meanwhile, many individuals and families struggle to obtain food that is affordable, accessible, and meaningfully connected to their cultures. Volume 18 of Advances in Medical Sociology brings cutting-edge sociological research to bear on these multiple dimensions of food systems and their impacts on individual and population health. This volume will highlight how food systems matter for health policy, health politics, and the lived experiences and life chances of individuals and communities.

Across the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, urban farmers and gardeners are reclaiming cultural traditions linked to food, farming, and health; challenging systemic racism and injustice in the food system; demanding greater community control of resources in marginalized neighborhoods; and moving towards their visions of more equitable urban futures. As part of this urgent work, urban farmers and gardeners encounter and reckon with both the cultural meanings and material legacies of the past. Drawing on their narratives, Back to the Roots demonstrates that urban agriculture is a critical domain for explorations of, and challenges to, the long standing inequalities that shape both the materiality of cities and the bodies of their inhabitants.

We rely on environmental health scientists to document the presence of chemicals where we live, work, and play and to provide an empirical basis for public policy. In the last decades of the 20th century, environmental health scientists began to shift their focus deep within the human body, and to the molecular level, in order to investigate gene-environment interactions. In "Exposed Science," Sara Shostak analyzes the rise of gene-environment interaction in the environmental health sciences and examines its consequences for how we understand and seek to protect population health. Drawing on in-depth interviews and ethnographic observation, Shostak demonstrates that what we know OCo and what we donOCOt know OCo about the vulnerabilities of our bodies to environmental hazards is profoundly shaped by environmental health scientistsOCO efforts to address the structural vulnerabilities of their field. She then takes up the political effects of this research, both from the perspective of those who seek to establish genomic technologies as a new basis for environmental regulation, and from the perspective of environmental justice activists, who are concerned that that their efforts to redress the social, political, and economical inequalities that put people at risk of environmental exposure will be undermined by molecular explanations of environmental health and illness. "Exposed Science" thus offers critically important new ways of understanding and engaging with the emergence of gene-environment interaction as a focal concern of environmental health science, policy-making, and activism.

We rely on environmental health scientists to document the presence of chemicals where we live, work, and play and to provide an empirical basis for public policy. In the last decades of the 20th century, environmental health scientists began to shift their focus deep within the human body, and to the molecular level, in order to investigate gene-environment interactions. In "Exposed Science," Sara Shostak analyzes the rise of gene-environment interaction in the environmental health sciences and examines its consequences for how we understand and seek to protect population health. Drawing on in-depth interviews and ethnographic observation, Shostak demonstrates that what we know OCo and what we donOCOt know OCo about the vulnerabilities of our bodies to environmental hazards is profoundly shaped by environmental health scientistsOCO efforts to address the structural vulnerabilities of their field. She then takes up the political effects of this research, both from the perspective of those who seek to establish genomic technologies as a new basis for environmental regulation, and from the perspective of environmental justice activists, who are concerned that that their efforts to redress the social, political, and economical inequalities that put people at risk of environmental exposure will be undermined by molecular explanations of environmental health and illness. "Exposed Science" thus offers critically important new ways of understanding and engaging with the emergence of gene-environment interaction as a focal concern of environmental health science, policy-making, and activism.