Industrialized food is dependent on modern infrastructure for its production, processing and distribution. On its way from producer to consumer, the food that ends up in our kitchens is often transformed beyond recognition, and it moves on a global scale. Modern food often undergoes complete deconstruction and reconstitution before it arrives in our refrigerators, even if the products we purchase seem natural and straight from the farm. Many agricultural products are broken down into their chemical compounds and nutritional building blocks; new products are created through the recombination of these parts. Whether something is lost in the process or if healthy nutrition is nothing more than the right ratio of nutrients remains an active question in nutritional science and beyond.

One central problem with many foodstuffs is that they spoil quickly. This time sensitivity makes the relations between food and infrastructure particularly complicated and unequal, as those who control the systems for moving and processing food have exorbitant power over those who produce it. Before the invention of modern infrastructures, many raw foodstuffs had to be processed quickly, in relatively small batches, close to the point of origin. Across the planet and for millennia, people have come up with a host of different methods to transform these into forms that are stable, often for years, and therefore storable and tradeable over long distances.

The contributions to this collection show the value and importance of an understanding of infrastructures that goes beyond their technical properties – these are much more than complex structures that simply move things. Rather, the articles employ a compellingly wide definition of infrastructure that includes community, kinship, memories, social connections, and things like pesticides, Indigenous rice varieties and community cookbooks. For decades, the term foodways has been used in food studies and beyond to account for the multifaceted relations between food, culture and identity – how the things we eat condition who we are and how we understand ourselves in relation to the world and to others. In line with the general thrust of Roadsides, we understand the term to focus on the ways food needs infrastructure to come into, move through and be in the world.