Editorial

This editorial address is intended as an opening reflection on food research dynamics at European level where the issues to be faced and the approaches to doing so are increasingly complex. Our proposal here is to consider these issues and the activities within which they are embedded as a series of communicative processes. We will seek to provide an overview of some of the intense and controversial debates around food, health and communication that open up a range of topics for research in Europe. These debates involve negotiations within and between public institutions, private organizations, a multiplicity of stakeholder groups, traditional and social media and consumers. Controversial processes of sense making span across corporate communications, social movements' insights, and an increasingly visible and established rhetoric around individual choices and responsibilities. These processes result in a fertile and productive terrain both for food and health campaigns across Europe and an associated wide ranging research agenda. Our networked era, moving beyond traditional media is thus changing and challenging organizational and institutional forms of communication. This becomes visible in the hard struggle for constituting and imposing claims about food and its meanings.