It is probable, non casu, sed demonstrationem, that the current epidemic of obesity (that ghost that travels the world, according to the guest editors of this issue) has some of its causes rooted in the Upper Palaeolithic. When the man left the cave in search of the sustenance of all, he implicitly claimed the best quality part of hunting or gathering for himself, as a guarantee of the perpetuation of his activity as a provider. Thus, their dependents had to settle for scraps for their own subsistence. As F. Engels reminds us in his 1884 work, The origin of the family, private property and the State, the first antagonism of classes that appeared in history coincides with the development of antagonism between men and women and the first class oppression, that of the female sex by the masculine.

This state of inequality is universalized with the arrival of the developed capitalist mode of production, which turns the mass media, dominated by the highest economic strata, into an instrument of seduction and punishment at the same time. While marketing strategies on the one hand induce the most dispossessed (economically and culturally) to consume low quality articles, on the other punish them by erecting human beings with an unsustainable thinness, in paradigms of image and well-being. Because of this manipulation, values are assigned to food depending on a questionable and often unverifiable quality: a farmed salmon is not the same as a “wild” salmon, a “normal” egg is not the same as one that comes from of a hen with “free grazing”. Here, the highest economic strata claim the highest quality food through price discrimination.

The works that appear in this issue provide a broad overview of food studies. As pointed out by the invited editors (appealing to the epistemic structures developed by Rolando García) they have a strongly interdisciplinary character, which is manifested through their diversity and levels of organization. While the literature on these issues has grown in recent years at a remarkable rate, the contributions of this number will make it an obligatory reference in future research.