Increasingly, many believe that food is for much more than simple biological maintenance. Our society is replete with examples of how food symbolizes our value structures, our relationships with each other, and the environment in which we live. We welcome friends, new and old, into our homes to share meals. We often do business over lunch or dinner. We welcome new neighbors with baked goods or vegetables from the garden. Religions base many of their traditions on restricting particular types of food or on full-on feasting. All implore believers to feed the hungry.
Cultural traditions vary greatly around the world, but it would be difficult to find an example that did not involve an element of respect for the way their food is produced, handled, prepared, or consumed. Traditionally, food was consumed in rather close proximity to where it was produced. It was only in recent decades that these traditions were disrupted. This disruption was coincidental with increasing human populations and the advent of refrigeration, transportation infrastructure, petroleum-based production inputs, concentrated and specialized large-scale production technologies, and other ingredients necessary to the development of the long supply chain model of providing food. Add to that the dual income household, information technology, and the concomitant overall busyness of modern life. The resulting disconnects have, arguably, played a role in the disruption of the fabric of the human community. As a result, the last two to three decades have witnessed a steady growth in interest in policies, programs, and practices aimed at ameliorating these conditions, and some are looking to food as an essential ingredient.
Many would argue that there are unintended consequences, primarily anthropomorphic but also more broadly construed, associated with the manner in which our food supply chain has evolved. These concerns range in focus from health, to environment, to economic structure, to social justice. But, for each argument critical of our current food system, there are to be found strong counter-arguments; the popular press is replete with stories that lean toward taking specific sides in these arguments, often demonizing those on the other side.
As editors of this special issue, we sought out local food scholars who strive to be fair, balanced, and as factual as possible in their arguments. For community development practitioners, we think this even-handed approach is appropriate as it should foster more sustainable community change. For community development scholars, this approach should lead us toward a stronger foundation for scholarly inquiry and ultimately more respect and credibility for efforts to better understand the phenomenon of local and regional food system development. As we go to press with this special issue, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis just released a new book titled Harvesting Opportunity: The Power of Regional Food System Investments to Transform Communities signaling a deepening interest in local food systems as a community economic development strategy and featuring some of the authors of the articles in this special issue.
The series of articles in this special issue provide scholarly and practical knowledge on a range of issues often associated with local food system development.
The first article by Steven Deller, R. David Lamie, and Maureen Stickel, Local food systems and community economic development, provides provoking thoughts and insights into how local food systems are performing from an interdisciplinary perspective with perhaps more weight on the community economics of local food systems. This article seeks to ask tough questions that those engaged in community economic development might demand of local food systems advocates. In their search for grounded theoretical frameworks, rigorous analysis, and hard facts they reveal the many challenges remaining for local food system advocates to make their case while indirectly emphasizing that much more academic and scholarly research needs to be conducted. They argue that much of the early research and policy work on local foods lacks quantitative rigor, but that in the past few years the quality of that work has greatly improved.
The second article by Todd Schmit and Becca Jablonski, Rural wealth creation of intellectual capital from urban local food system initiatives: Developing indicators to assess change, reports on interesting research focused on the rural diffusion of knowledge gained by rural farmers selling in urban farmers markets in New York City. It demonstrates how knowledge gained from interactions with an urban customer base might benefit the rural regions where these farmers live and operate their farms. Here, they find that the flow of information through the rural-urban networks forged through local food systems has a positive impact on innovation for all that are involved in the systems.
The next article by Steven Deller, Amber Canto, and Laura Brown, Food access, local foods, and community health, provides insights into the relationships between food access, local foods, and community health and the necessary and sufficient conditions for public health and how access to local foods plays into these dynamics. After a detailed review of the food and public health literature, they use statistical analysis to measure patterns between local food access and several measures of public health. While they find strong positive relationships suggesting higher levels of local foods is associated with better health outcomes, they warn that causation has not been established. Is it the case that more local foods result in better health, or is it the case that healthier people create a market for local foods? They suggest that future work in this area should focus on causation and not simply correlation.
This is followed by the article by Jeffrey O’Hara and Carlos Coleman that focuses on two specific funding programs targeted to local food systems development, the Farmers Market Promotion Program (FMPP) and Local Food Promotion Program (LFPP). In this study they review a national survey of farmers market administrators and two case studies of grant recipients and find interesting connections between program success and strong stakeholder support and involvement. These lessons are helping them to shape the future of these programs with the intent of not only strengthening the local food system, but the community. As community developers realize, not all communities are equally capable of successfully navigating and finding success with federal programs. Those who do successfully compete for these grants likely have invested in supporting a successful grant writer and also likely already have gained momentum with related projects. As agency staff resources are diminished and the paperwork required increases, there is a tendency toward a smaller number of larger grants being provided, meaning a smaller number of community projects will likely be supported. Those communities that are well organized and collaborate within a regional context are more likely to be funded. How this squares with the FMPP and LFPP requirements to prioritize applicants in areas of concentrated poverty remains to be seen.
Finally, the last article in this special collection is by John Green, Jim Worstell, and Caroline Canarios. The Local Agrifood System Sustainability/Resilience Index (SRI): A research note on constructing a data tool applied to counties in the southern United States focuses on methodological development. Building from previously conducted case studies and theoretical work, the authors operationalize a resilience framework with county-level data, drawing on individual indicators and a summative index to identify local agrifood system patterns in the southern US. They emphasize indicators of local efforts to create adaptive local agrifood systems with the intent of providing development practitioners and policy-makers with tools to inform decision-making.
In addition, this special issue provides reviews of three important books, each focusing on very timely and important topics of interest that should be considered required reading to anyone seriously engaged in community food systems issues.
| • | The color of food: Stories of race, resilience and farming, by Natasha Bowens. | ||||
| • | Growing livelihoods: Local food systems and community development, by Rhonda Phillips and Christopher Wharton. | ||||
| • | American wasteland: How America throws away nearly half of its food (and what we can do about it), by Jonathan Bloom. | ||||
We would like to thank the authors who took the time to share their wisdom and insights and for being good sports during the editorial process.
Last, but definitely not least, we would like to thank the Southern Rural Development Center for providing the financial support for the publication of this special issue.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Funding
This publication was made possible through funding from the Southern Rural Development Center, one of four Regional Rural Development Centers funded through the US Department of Agriculture, National Institute for Food and Agriculture. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in the publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the SRDC or the US Department of Agriculture.
Related Research Data
