Food means heritage, culture and lifestyle. Food is also a crucial aspect of family and individual family human existence fulfilling physiological as well as psychological needs i.e. all people eat to live but some also live to eat. The latter includes those with a hedonistic lifestyle, who eat "food for food's sake", and this is linked to food memory. Food meets physiological needs but to do so must be nutritional as well as organoleptically appetizing. All of this has inspired the promotion of this special issue on "Food: a medicine for a population's health and a country's economy" of the British Food Journal in order to investigate and capture the main intrinsic and extrinsic dynamics. We have selected seventeen papers that even without dealing with all the relevant issues related to these new trends of the food systems disclose interesting features to be stressed. The dealt topics have only been covered peripherally in other academic papers and not in a holistic way. The theme of considering the role of food as medicine for economy, for human health and psychological well-being is unique and has been received little attention.