Food has so far had only a marginal role in the study of South American societies. By contrast, the study of how society eats has been taken much further in the United States and Canada, as indeed in Europe. The ambition of this third issue of IdeAs is to help fill the gap and give new impetus to a field which, though forgotten or left largely unexplored by social science, is yet powerfully present in cultural representations and daily practice on both sides of the Atlantic. A further aim of the studies gathered here is to place the sociological, anthropological and historical aspects of food throughout the American continent in a comparative perspective.