ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that sustainable diets require insights from food economics that go beyond the simple rhetoric that markets and prices will determine outcomes or allocate resources. It reviews a number of key features of what is required from economics such as inequality of access, labour in the food supply chain, the persistence of low wages, the surprising and shocking state of slavery and poor working conditions in some communities, the hidden and often unpaid extra costs due to environmental and health externalities, and the burden of waste. The word 'economics' came to mean the 'rules of the house', the principles of domestic management, and only thence was it applied to the wider economy. Domestic science and home economics can be tracked as reactions to and purveyors of how to address big change in food. Subsidy systems began to be put in place to incentivise production.
