ABSTRACT
Definitions of food security are like noses: everybody has one. One review from over twenty years ago yielded close to two hundred definitions (Smith et al., 1992), which means the literature today is populated with considerably more (recall from the previous chapter that a Google search generated roughly 19.7 million “hits”). Yet this chapter is not concerned with how food security is conceived by agri-food scholars. The focus of this chapter, rather, lies in more concrete matters: namely, in how food security has actually been enacted through agrifood policy. This exercise, admittedly, will require some interpretation as what has been said and what has been done in the name of food security are not always the same. An examination of the stated and implied aims of, and the consequences arising from, agrifood policies and practices over the last sixty years—as they have often been described as food security enhancing (Mooney and Hunt, 2009)—reveals an outline of the concept that is surprisingly stable.
