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Welcome to our first edition of Food, Fiber, and Fashion Quarterly, a magazine devoted to exploring various aspects of products we commonly consume to clothe or nourish our bodies. In this issue, contributors seek to reveal dimensions of products that typically remain hidden to ordinary consumers. In the academic discipline of economics, this imbalance of information — where one party sees a full picture and the other party sees only part of it — is called information asymmetry.  Writ large, the economists tell us, this uneven distribution of information can lead to power imbalances and market difficulties among economic systems.  For ordinary consumers, it can mean unwittingly supporting industries whose products, production functions, or business models wreak havoc on the environment, employees of the industry, our health, or society more generally.  Information asymmetry can also mean purchasing products that purport to solve a particular problem but end up causing other, equally problematic situations even as they solve the original problem.  Finally, consumers’ lack of knowledge can lead to purchasing products that seem to be a good deal, but in the end, fail to deliver on their promises.

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