Alan Warde is Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester, UK. He has recently been working on the project Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion which examines patterns of cultural taste and participation in the UK. Written with colleagues on the project – Tony Bennett, Mike Savage Elizabeth Silva, David Wright and Modesto Gayo-Cal – a book, Culture, Capital, Distinction, will be published by Routledge in early 2009. He has also worked extensively on the sociology of consumption, often with reference to food. Publications include: Consumption, Food and Taste: culinary antinomies and commodity culture, (Sage, 1997); Eating Out: social differentiation, consumption and pleasure, (Cambridge University Press, 2000) with Lydia Martens; and Trust in Food: an institutional and comparative analysis, (Palgrave, 2007) with Unni Kjaernes and Mark Harvey.