This international conference is based on the host organisation's promotion of food research on a cross-disciplinary and long-term, sustained basis. In this conference, a special feature will be the collaboration with the Graduate School of Agriculture at Kyōto University in Japan, which will take the macro-perspectives of agricultural production and contemporary environmental economics into the field of food research. In fact, this is in line with the academic duty of responding to the environmental crisis connected with ongoing climate change. This has a great deal to do with the topic of food. Some of these changes may appear as ordinary, but can also be very sudden and intrusive. The famous Marxist geographer David Harvey has said that in the first class in the theory of geography, he likes to ask students what they had for breakfast that morning. The reason is that this question will bring along with it an inexhaustible train of questions about modernisation, globalisation, social change and even reflections about the environment, provoking theoretical discussions and questions about social practice.

       Apart from this, foods can be very individual, on questions of taste and likes and dislikes, but they can also be a means of penetrating into social and cultural domains. We often hear this kind of thing said, “I am what I eat.” This saying not only expresses the underlying biological awareness that the body and lifestyle are formed by the things that he or she eats, but at the same time expresses the idea that individuality and preferences can be expressed through the food choices one makes. The French gourmand Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin in his Physiologie du goût (A physiology of taste), published in 1825, said, “Tell me what you eat, and I will then know what kind of a person you are.” In fact, it is not just individuals, but also social groups, whose food and drink often reveal their special nature and have a high degree of recognisability. Moreover, because of this, they form one of the foundations of group identity. One can see from this something of the importance of food and drink in the civilisation of humankind. More importantly, through the process of eating, the relationship between the production of foodstuffs and their preservation, transport, buying and selling, preparation and consumption is that they are all connected together, so when we start to talk about foodstuffs, unavoidably we have to discuss the social structure and cultural contents of the society in which we are situated, and even the material environment in which we live.

       Food exists as a concrete and mundane entity, yet it can also be a very sacred thing. Many religious rituals, ethical values, and offerings cannot be separated from food. Naturally among them there are many topics that are connected with propriety and ethical values. The theologian Norman Wirzba in his 2011 book Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating asked the question, “When a person eats, there are at the same time bodies of living creatures that are fragmented in this process.” A basic tenet of ecological theory on the description of food chains or food networks is that clearly revealing the entities in an ecological system or transfers of energy takes place through “eating” (entities serving as food or obtained). Food embodies many topics and items of knowledge, so there are even scholars who have proposed the concept ‘foodscape’ to indicate that we must think about what constitutes food from temporal and spatial perspectives, and then also about the significance of food and knowledge about it. This is the key concept behind this conference, in inviting scholars from different places in Japan and Taiwan to come together and explore these questions. In this conference we have planned to organize eight major topics for discussion, separately covering agriculture, soil, the environment, government policy, security, ethics, folklore and customs, cultural heritage, economics, culture, technology, indigenous peoples and education and their various connections with food. These are connected in turn with a wide variety of topics for academic discussion. These are:

1.Soil health and sustainable agriculture (6)
2.Food security and food policy (3)
3.Food ethics (2)
4.Food and education (3)
5.Food customs and intangible cultural heritage (10)
6.Cultural and social factors of foodways (9)
7.Food cultures of indigenous peoples (8)
8.Agriculture and food technology (9)

       The plan of these eight topics (the number behind the topics means the number of related papers) can be encapsulated in three aspects of the study of food, namely food safety, food security, and food sovereignty.

       First, in the food safety part, we are mainly concerned with the production and preparation processes, including conducting systematic investigations into factors that might influence human health. Our sub-topics include 'sustainable agriculture', 'food technology', and 'soil health'. These three items are all directly related to questions of food safety. Natural farming methods emphasizes a return to a mutually supportive and nurturing relationship between living things and the environment, and recommends not using artificial chemical fertilizers and pesticides, that is, to return to a basic interactive relationship between human beings and the environment. Furthermore, not only the countryside, but the urban areas are now beginning to practice natural farming. In this respect, the relationship between the environmental system and biological diversity becomes the main focus of research interest. Here, it is worth noting that biologically diverse situations are necessarily themselves dependent on non-biological physical conditions for their survival, such as water and soil. Water, as everybody knows, is essential for life itself, while the importance of soil is frequently overlooked. In fact, the function of micro-organisms are a key to the quality of the soils and the base for sustainable agriculture. In ancient societies and in indigenous culture, soil has always been regarded as a living vibrant entity. Contemporary soil science has demonstrated that soil itself is a system of living organisms. The above three topics' elevance for food safety is just as strong as measures taken for food safety inspections which have always been the main focus of attention, and scholarly attempts to deepen and widen the field of view will take the health of the environment in which foods are produced into account. 

       Secondly, the part on 'food security' relates to the security and stability of food supplies and their equitable, just distribution. Scholars have pointed out that the production of grains globally has exceeded the actual needs of the global human population. The question then arises, why are there still regional problems with famine? These problems are related to national systems and the implementation of government policies, but also how we think about the educational problems connected with the underlying social and cultural aspects of 'food literacy'. Responding to the topic of 'food security', for this conference we have planned the three topic areas 'food security and food policy', 'food ethics', and 'food and education' and have tried to invite scholars to address such questions from the point of view of systems, policy, education, and ethics, and ponder questions of food security and equitable distribution in relation to current national systems and the market. Moreover, the development of technology also brings the impact on the food innovation like the alternative meat issue. In fact, under the stimulus of Covid-19 and the war between Russia and the Ukraine, food supplies and food needs in many areas have undergone great changes, as the clear example of the egg shortage in Taiwan as well as in the world and corresponding changes to government policy have shown.  

       Thirdly, there is the aspect of 'food sovereignty'. 'Food sovereignty' is a problem that has received a lot of attention internationally in recent years. Simply put, this is a question of investigating whether there is a basic right for 'those people' to use 'which kinds' of methods, and 'at what time' and 'in what place', to produce, use, and consume foodstuffs. Under the operations of the global capitalist economy in which the production, circulation and consumption of foods takes place, the production of many local foods and the cultural consumption models underlying them have been subject to extremely large impacts, and have been seeking ways to respond and change. The influence these kinds of changes to society have had on food cultures, and how one might achieve sustained development for diverse food cultures in the face of these globalized pressures for uniformity, monopoly and standardization, are a central topic for 'food sovereignty', which uses a kind of concept of basic rights to penetrate the interior of questions about culture, politics and economics. On the basis of the critical importance of this topic, we have also planned three corresponding sub-topics, including 'food customs and intangible cultural heritage', 'cultural and social factors of foodways' and 'food cultures of indigenous peoples', with the aim of uncovering manifestations of autonomy in food systems across a wide range of social and cultural environments from the welter of complex and disparate phenomena, and their responses and adaptations to the onslaught of recent political and economic challenges within the context of ongoing globalization. 

       Finally, the idea behind this conference in inviting scholars to congregate in a single venue is, through academic discussions on food cultures, to deepen understanding of the issues, promote cross-regional dialogue, and discuss ways out of the current global crisis, as well as set up networks of collaboration as a basis for continued progress. The three above-mentioned topics and eight sub-topics have been chosen through discussions with Japanese scholars on food cultures, and are the foundations on which planning for this international conference has taken place. We invite everybody to come along to the conference and help make it a splendid and productive occasion.