Food futures refer to emerging transformations in food production, distribution, regulation, and consumption under conditions of climate pressure, technological change, and sustainability transition. Contemporary food systems are shaped by alternative proteins, AI-mediated information flows, sustainability labelling, climate-related risk, platform-based food consumption, and new forms of public-health and nutrition communication. Their growing complexity matters because the multilingual and cultural conditions through which these transformations are understood, trusted, resisted, and translated remain underexamined, even as they shape trust, legitimacy, inclusion, and the uptake of innovation across diverse publics.
This Collection examines the communicative infrastructures through which food futures are imagined, negotiated, and made socially actionable. We invite interdisciplinary contributions from translation studies, linguistics, communication and media studies, food studies, sociology, anthropology, policy studies, and environmental humanities that explore how food futures are translated across languages, institutions, media, and publics, and how such translation shapes trust, participation, and legitimacy in food-system transitions.
We are particularly interested in contributions that advance a nuanced understanding of translation as more than linguistic transfer. In particular, we welcome innovative theoretical and empirical studies that treat translation as a form of cultural and communicative mediation, emphasizing the interlingual, intralingual, and semiotic processes through which future-oriented food knowledge becomes meaningful to different publics.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- Literary translation and representations of food, culture, and society
- Transnational translation and regulation in promotional messaging and food labelling
- Multilingual communication and translation of sustainable diets, food transitions, and emerging food technologies
- Translation and cross-cultural perceptions of food labelling, certification, traceability, and consumer trust
- Translation of the social impact of responsible innovation in food systems, including alternative proteins, smart packaging, platform-based food services, and data-driven food infrastructures
- Food waste communication and the translation of sustainability into household practices
- Geopolitics of food discourse, policy translation, and public communication across East-West and North-South contexts
- Media, discourse, and platform-based framings of food futures
- Migration, multilingual publics, and the equity of access to nutritional and health information
- Indigenous, local, and community knowledge in sustainable food communication and translation
- Gendered narratives and the intersectional translation of food futures
- Psychosocial branding, marketing translation, and the cultural mediation of food and nutrition
- Food, health, and environmental communication across cultural and translational contexts
- Cultural interpretations and translations of novelty, taste, risk, resistance, and responsibility in future food debates
- Multilingual communication and interpretation of food poverty and food insecurity
- AI-mediated food translation and the digital circulation of food knowledge, including the ethics of AI translation
We particularly encourage contributions that combine theoretical reflection with empirical analysis and engage comparatively across different languages, cultures, and geographical contexts.
This Collection supports and amplifies research related to SDG 02 – Zero Hunger
For more details refer here
