Chapter 2 lays the foundations for the study and further clarifies its scope. Unhealthy lifestyles are defined here as collective patterns of unhealthy behaviour, based on choices from options available to people according to their life chances. This definition highlights four key dimensions central to the book: the health risks associated with those behaviours, their consumable nature, their voluntary character and, finally, the relevance of social norms and structural factors. The chapter explores the health dimension in greater detail for each of the three categories of products studied here, tobacco, alcohol and unhealthy foods, clarifying the health risks to which consumers are exposed and introducing the central regulatory questions raised by each category.

Charles Mann’s book The Wizard and The Prophet highlights the divergent perspectives of Norman Borlaug (a ‘Wizard’ advocating agricultural innovation for a better future) and William Vogt (a ‘Prophet’ foreseeing environmental degradation as a barrier to a better future). Borlaug’s Green Revolution, which relied on the massive mobilization of ancient geological deposits of phosphorus, has exceeded the planetary boundary for this essential element, threatening our drinking water and the oceans, a Vogtian outcome. The battle between agricultural Wizards and water quality Prophets rages on at the food–water nexus. This article proposes a third way that goes beyond the Wizard-Prophet dichotomy and is led by ‘Systems Innovators’, who see innovation and technology as part of broader networks embedded in Earth systems and as requiring new forms of governance that recognize feedback and impacts. These new players have a critical role to play in navigating the complex sociobiogeochemical cycles of the Anthropocene.

Chapter 4 provides an historical overview of the content and objectives of the EU’s policy on unhealthy lifestyles. It distinguishes two periods. The first spans from the early days of European integration until the entry into force of the Treaty of Maastricht, in 1993. It is a period of negative integration: unhealthy products are regulated mostly through the prism of the TFEU internal market freedoms. One cannot yet speak of an EU ‘policy’ on the matter, in the sense of a deliberate and coordinated action made in response to the health burden associated with unhealthy lifestyles. This changes post-Maastricht, the second period, with the recognition of a formal competence for the EU in health matters. Unhealthy lifestyles are singled out as one of the key priorities of EU health action and a greater role is given to positive integration, with the adoption of various horizontal legislative instruments. Different approaches emerged for the three categories of products: while the declared goal is to bring tobacco consumption to a near end, alcohol consumption is considered to be a natural part of human life, not to be overly discouraged, with food and nutrition positioned somewhere in between.

Chapter 5 continues the overview through a different analytical lens. It investigates the EU’s toolbox, describing and classifying the regulatory tools used by the EU legislature across the different lifestyles. It identifies four main types of interventions: ban and composition requirements, tax and price measures, rules on advertising and promotion and rules on mandatory and voluntary information. Beyond this systematic description and classification, the chapter serves three aims. First, it confronts the regulatory tools used with the stated objectives of EU lifestyle policy, assessing their adequacy and suggesting possible reforms. Second, it highlights the significant regulatory disparities existing between lifestyle risk factors, critically evaluating the justifications for such differential treatment. Third, it shows how health and internal market objectives are intertwined in EU lifestyle policy, generating legal frictions.

This chapter sets out conditions in January, which saw Britain bracing for a war in Europe; starvation on the streets of London and major cities, where need outran resource and the organisation of welfare; a parallel discussion of food for the middle classes; and a series of accidents and building collapses, which also show up the lack of infrastructure in quickly expanding cities. All this suggests that the year might counter later appraisals of the 1850s as confident and optimistic. The opening of the National Portrait Gallery in London speaks to a nation perhaps more confident in its past than its present and future. The present had to deal with agitation for suffrage reform and the threat of French aggression in Europe. At the same time, is fiction being recognised as an important literary form in a year that saw significant personal upheaval in the lives of Dickens and Eliot.

This chapter examines one of Hipponax’s best known (and least understood) fragments, fr. 3a West. With its reference to Kandaules as a supposed ‘Maeonian’ (i.e. Lydian) equivalent of a ‘dog-throttling’ Hermes, the fragment has variously been examined as purported evidence for the Lydian pantheon, kingship, and sacrificial practices. After correcting these less-than-adequate explanations of the supposed theonym on the basis of recent advances in our knowledge of Lydian, this chapter investigates a more pressing and hitherto neglected question: how this glossing of ‘Hermes the dog-throttler’ as Kandaules functions within the poetic objectives of Hipponax and of the iambic genre. In so doing, it becomes clear that Hipponax’s Kandaules is no god and that the passage is purely comical, achieving its effect through a complex juxtaposition of differing elements from the cultural assemblage of sixth-century Ionia. Unpacking the humour of the lines brings into relief the compositional technique of Hipponactean poetry, in particular how Hipponax creates an associative nexus in which interpretation and humour operate at multiple levels. This chapter argues that an understanding of the multi-ethnic and multi-linguistic context of Hipponax’ poetry is critical for appreciating the complexity, linguistic polysemy, and poetic artistry of Hipponax as a poet.

Chapter 13 reviews where the US-China trade war fits in the larger competition between these two states, with special emphasis on national security as a justification for trade restrictions. These issues are explored at both at the strategic (economy-wide) and tactical (sectoral) levels, starting with a review of where the trade war fits in current thinking on law, military science, and technological innovation. The analysis turns to a more detailed review of the rationales for, and impact of, specific actions that the Trump and Biden administrations have taken to control trade. The sectors reviewed include agriculture, rare earths, energy, steel and other metals, arms and dual-use goods, and goods and services in the communications sector.

This chapter examines how commercial firms like the Belgian grocer Delhaize did not initially respond to the Single Market Program in the mid-1980s, but they did mobilize swiftly in the late 1980s to prepare for the "threat" of the new business and regulatory environment of an integrated regional market governed by social and environmental protections. Together with other food retailers, Delhaize formed sectoral clubs and associations to defend its interests: Buying clubs collectivized price negotiating power against producer consolidation and protected profit margins, while interest associations brought distributors and retailers together to influence European policymaking. At the same time, Delhaize and other commercial firms saw in the opening of Eastern Europe a profitable business opportunity, and they expanded quickly into the markets of Poland, Hungary, and the new Czech Republic in the early 1990s. As a result, the case of Delhaize gives us purchase on the complexity of business responses to market integration and demonstrates the diverse paths to regionalization for and against the Single Market.

The 1800s was a decade of exceptionally high agricultural prices. The cost of food spiked because of deficient harvests and wartime disruption, against a background of rapid population growth. In the eyes of many contemporary observers, profiteers and monopolists were also to blame. This essay examines three poems that responded to the emergency: Samuel Jackson Pratt’s Bread; or, The Poor (1801), William Holloway’s The Peasant’s Fate (1802), and Thomas Bachelor’s The Progress of Agriculture (1804). It locates those poems in a larger tradition of rural verse exemplified by Oliver Goldsmith, Robert Bloomfield, and George Crabbe. As the new century dawned, the poets of country life confronted the social tensions implicit in England’s capitalistic farming system. They denounced what they saw as a contradiction between rising agricultural output on the one hand and, on the other, the dispossession of the ‘helpless myriads’ of the rural poor.

The environment has been leveraged as a tool of control in conflict settings throughout human history. Capturing or enclosing and controlling the resources needed for everyday needs and livelihoods has been a feature of most conflicts. Understanding how this happens and what the implications are for the environment in conflict is critical to addressing environmental and conflict issues. This chapter lays out how this has unfolded in many contexts and highlights critical nuances for different environmental mediums and across space and time.

Theatre depicts the way the socio-climate of so it reads Theatre depicts the way the socio-climate of drought intenstified in Australia as settler farmers drought intensified in Australia as settler farmers cleared land to plant imported food crops and, in particular, rain-dependent wheat. Local ecologies were drastically changed by colonial occupation. Dryness and dust increased where there had previously been the biodiverse sources of food depicted in Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander First Nations (First Nations) performance and drama. Different meanings for meanings for home and homeland exemplify the genocidal conflict between First Nations Country and settler farmsteads. Plays by, for example, Noongar writer Jack Davis and the pre-eminent Dorothy Hewett feature ecologies drastically altered by wheat farming in conjunction with oppressive race and gender relations. Drama about mining similarly shows a combination of ecological damage and social inequity. As Jill Orr performs in a vast monocrop of wheat and amidst gypsum mine waste, her bird-like action evokes in a vast monocrop field of wheat grief over an ecocidal loss of multispecies habitats.