One of the most important drivers of the Anthropocene was a radical shift in what and how people eat. Industrial agriculture and meat production, new ways of processing, packaging, and distributing food, and the globalization of culinary habits not only upended traditional lifeways around the world but also continue to play a key role in climate change, biodiversity loss, and various other processes that are transforming the Earth system – now rendering food production increasingly precarious. Nowhere have these changes been more dramatic or consequential than in Asia. The essays in this volume examine how literary works from the Asian continent have responded to the profound changes in the region’s foodscapes. They cover poetry, prose fiction, and literary non-fiction from China, India, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Taiwan.

Hannes Bergthaller is a professor at the English Department of National Taiwan Normal University. His research focuses on ecocritical theory, social systems theory, and the literature and cultural history of US environmentalism. He is the co-author of The Anthropocene: Key Issues for the Humanities (2020). You-ting Chen is Assistant Professor of Foreign Languages and Literatures at National Chung Hsing University in Taiwan. His research interests include nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, ethnic studies, and ecocriticism.