Our essay invites food scholars to consider how the recent technological developments are making ‘big data’ increasingly relevant to our field. We offer an overview of the how big data and related crowdsourcing of information are penetrating the production and marketing of food, and reflect on what are potentially key ethical and epistemological questions that link big data with issues of sustainability and social justice in food systems. Our aim is to initiate a more deliberate dialogue between data scholars and food scholars to more comprehensively assess contemporary agri-food environments.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Bronson, K., Knezevic, I., (2025), "Food studies scholars can no longer ignore the rise of big data", HSSCommons: (DOI: 10.15353/cfs-rcea.v3i1.138)

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1. agricultural 'apps'
2. big data
3. crowdsourcing
4. new technologies

Original publication: Bronson, Kelly; Knezevic, Irena. "Food studies scholars can no longer ignore the rise of big data." Canadian Food Studies / La Revue canadienne des études sur l'alimentation, vol. 3, no. 1, 2016, pp. 9-19. DOI: 10.15353/cfs-rcea.v3i1.138. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Canadian Food Studies / La Revue canadienne des études sur l'alimentation. Copyright © the author(s). Work published in CFS/RCÉA prior to and including Vol. 8, No. 3 (2021) is licensed under the Creative Commons CC BY license. Work published in Vol. 8, No. 4 (2021) and after is licensed under the Creative Commons CC BY-SA license. For details, see creativecommons.org/licenses/.