The Anglo-Saxon Fenland

important contribution to the cross-fertilisation of research. Given the range of approaches summarised it should not be a surprise that the chapters recommending future courses of action often address different problems: biodiversity protection versus feeding a growing human population, for example, or issues of rural development as opposed to approaches to urban agriculture. Indeed, different chapters frequently present apparently contradictory analyses: the assertion by several authors that feeding a projected 10 billion people will require a doubling of current levels of food production, for instance, is disputed in the chapter by Raffle and Carey where it is asserted that global food production in 2014 was sufficient to feed 14 billion. Drilling into the cited sources and data may demonstrate that this is a difference of perspective rather than a real contradiction, of course (e.g. different projection methods or different modelling assumptions), but presenting counter arguments within a single volume serves to illustrate the vibrancy of these debates and the inevitability of trade-offs in any attempts to balance social, economic and ecological concerns. In omitting a synthetic introduction or conclusion the editors force the reader to draw their own conclusions regarding these competing imperatives, but the volume does a good job of introducing the reader to a range of approaches and concepts – even if I for one am still no wiser as to what is meant by a ‘foodway’. All the chapters add something to this mix, meaning that the handbook is perhaps best read as a volume rather than as individual papers on discrete areas of work, since together they illustrate the complex intersections between landscapes and food and hence the complexity of our attempts to manage both.