After decades of wanting food in greater quantities, cheaper, and standardized, Americans now increasingly look for quality and crafting. Grocery giants like Walmart and Target have responded by offering “simple” and “organic” food displayed in folksy crates with seals of organizational approval, while only blocks away a farmer may drop his tailgate on a pickup full of sweet corn at a four-way stop. Meanwhile, easy-up tents are likely to unfurl over multigenerational farmers’ markets once or twice a week in any given city or town. No longer peopled by women and old men, markets see sons shopping with their fathers as mother and daughter farmers share produce stands while buskers, students, political activists, photographers, and journalists ply their arts in the aisles. Ostrich, bison, goat, mutton, and every cut of the familiar chicken, pork, and beef come with dazzling endorsements of their local provenance: free-range, cage-free, local, non-GMO, grass-fed, heirloom, biodynamic, natural, organic, community-supported, cooperative, nonprofit. Mac ’n’ “cheez” out of a box may still taste like home cooking to some, and canned-soup casserole may be the pinnacle of culinary adventurousness for others, but chances are, even someone who grew up on those mid-century delicacies is changing what she or he wants to eat and where it comes from.
This book is about is about local food and why it matters. Food organizes our relationship to the world in important ways. “Eating is an agricultural act,” says Wendell Berry,1 and our decisions about what we eat change how food is grown, the people who grow it, and the world we live in. Food has become central to the current cultural movement about making and accountability that is sweeping the country. Like its cousins in upcycling, artisan, small-batch, handmade, vintage, craft, and other labor-intensive endeavors, the movement arises concurrently with vast technological advances, population migrations, financial precariousness, and unprecedented environmental change. It responds to a sense of deterioration, alienation, injustice, insecurity, and xenophobia that plagues many Americans and offers a promising way forward—connecting people with places in ways that express their relationships and responsibilities, histories and hopes.2
This book is about both the idea of selling local—its appeal and promise—and the practical ways that gets done in the dynamic context of the twenty-first century. As the pieces come into focus, we can understand food’s special capacity to blur distinctions between producers and consumers and to expand our sense of global citizenship. The responsibility for food that is healthful, just, and environmentally sound becomes a shared responsibility of an integrated world.
Trends
Country music superstar Willie Nelson once commented that growing up poor in Texas during the Great Depression meant local food was all they had to eat. True enough. For millennia, people ate mostly what was available to hand—fresh, stored, and traded. However, with the mass production of industrialization and improvements in transportation during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, food production and consumption became centralized, homogenous, and fragmented. As cities expanded, farms were forced outside of population centers. In the 1920s, grocery stores replaced produce markets in major cities. At mid-century, women—the conventional home cooks—increasingly worked outside the home, and “convenience” became the watchword of food preparation: one-ingredient cakes, TV dinners, frozen vegetables that cooked right in the plastic bag. Improvements in refrigeration and shipping meant we could get pineapples “jet fresh” from Hawaii and “tea and oranges that come all the way from China” as a popular Leonard Cohen song put it. Soon, we thought, entire meals would come in pill form.
One popular way to tell the story of the local revolution is that Americans started taking food back around the time Alice Waters created a restaurant in Berkeley, California, that sourced its ingredients from its own garden. That was in 1971. Now restaurants go so far as to feature locally grown, locally ground polenta served in handmade bowls thrown by a nearby potter. Neighborhood potluck dinners, too, may include venison stew or steaks from beef raised locally. An ancient institution occurring worldwide—along the Silk Road in Kashgar, China; in Timbuktu, Mali, and Marrakesh, Morocco, in Africa; and in the Aztec cities of Tenochtitlan and Tlatelolco in Mexico, among other far-flung places—European-style markets were established in the colonial cities of Boston in 1634, Hartford in 1643, New York in 1686, and Philadelphia in 1693. New Orleans had a market as early as 1779 and Cincinnati, on the frontier, in 1801. The early boom in farmers’ markets continued well into the 1800s until they began to fade under the pressure of economic and cultural forces. By the mid-1850s, farmers’ markets began to decline so that by 1900 only half of the municipal areas in the United States still had one.3 By 1979 agricultural giant California was home to only a half dozen markets, with only a single steady farmers’ market in all of Southern California.4
Compare this decline to today. By 2010 California had more than 729 markets, with over 80 in Los Angeles County alone. Other states with high numbers included New York with 520, Michigan with 349, and Illinois with 305. Even Alaska, with its small population and short growing season, saw 46 percent more markets in a single year, bringing that state’s 2011 grand total to 35.5 Between 1994 and 2012, US farmers’ markets increased in total numbers by more than 450 percent.6 Across the country, farmers’ markets now number over 8,000, a figure that continues to grow annually. Numbers such as these make farmers’ markets the fastest-growing, though still small, segment of the US food economy and an important tool for the prosperity and well- being of communities.
Similarly, community supported agriculture (CSA) programs have taken off in recent decades. This new innovation on agricultural tradition dissolves the usual producer-consumer dichotomy by creating a formal partnership by which a farm becomes “either legally or spiritually, the community’s farm.”7 Shareholders buy into some of the risks of the farm, typically at the beginning of a growing season; participate in its production and care; and receive a share of its bounty in return—maybe a great quantity in bumper years and not much at all in lean ones. Either way, the connection gets made: customers connect with a farm, and growers defray some of uncertainties by stabilizing their customer base and acquiring working capital. In addition, communities gain the security of a short-distance and highly accountable food system that supports local businesses.
CSAs first took hold in the United States in the mid-1980s in New England. One lineage, sometimes debated, can be traced to Japan in the mid-1960s when mothers concerned with the loss of farmland and the importation of food contracted with community-based farms.8 The other significant lineage comes from German and Swiss cooperatives in the mid-1960s designed to fund and support the full cost of having agriculture that was ecologically sound and socially equitable.9 From the earliest US examples in 1986—Indian Line Farm in Massachusetts and Temple-Wilton Community Farm in New Hampshire—the CSA model of sharing risks and rewards has grown to over twelve thousand programs nationwide.10
Recently, food hubs—which aggregate farm products from small producers into quantities suitable for larger institutions, such as restaurants, hospitals, and schools—and other innovative strategies have expanded the ways in which local food can be distributed. Today, more than three hundred regional food hubs operate in the United States.11 They vary in business structure—nonprofits, cooperatives, for-profits, or multi-structured—but each offers a host of benefits to farmers, customers, and communities.12 Currently, the federal government as well as state, county, and community organizations, including extension services, are actively supporting food hub development through grants, research, and state and regional initiatives.13
All of this energy comes in the context of explosive global population growth. Thirty-six metropolitan areas now qualify as “megacities” of over ten million residents, and a continued growth rate of over 1 percent per year will see eight billion humans by 2024.14 Ironically, however, productivity-based critiques of local food tend to depopulate the rich human experience of food. They reduce food to calories-in and calories-out, necessary but insufficient as they are—effectively decentering the experiences of farmers and eaters and neglecting the elaborated foodways that help to make us human. Buying and selling local must be considered in these contexts, however. And we have found that, as simple and nearby as it sounds, “local” itself holds answers to this conundrum. The term productively bundles together complications and apparent contradictions for those seeking to reclaim independence of agency without renouncing a shared stake in the commons. Its meaning in use reveals an ideology that enacts, reveals, and recasts relations of power among people. If we can “sell” the idea of local, in it we can find the levers we need for scaling up production to meet future needs.
Perspectives
Our perspectives on local food come from both lived experience and scholarly engagement. We have both lived on small farms in the United States—growing, selling, and eating their bounty and buying from our neighbors who do the same. And we have both studied the people who make these farms run and those who rely on them for food. The result is a unique collaboration. We use our various experiences and disciplinary lenses to jump-start our understanding of the theory and practice of local food. By talking with the people of local food, and surveying them and watching them at work, we hope to give them fair voice and to explore the possibilities represented by the local ideology.
Jennifer Meta Robinson started experimenting with food politics in college when she became a vegetarian and joined a student farming cooperative. Her co-op job included compost duty—driving the group’s old, half-ton pickup truck behind the dining halls every week to pick up trash barrels brimming with vegetable matter. In other roles at other co-ops, she bought apples and cider by the carload at local orchards and sprouted five-gallon buckets of mung, lentil, alfalfa, and sunflower seeds for student-run kitchens. When she left college after two years, she moved to rural Kentucky, built what now would be called an off-grid tiny house, and grew a few vegetables in her backwoods garden. At the same time, she became the manager of a small cooperative grocery store, which had monthly deliveries from the larger Federation of Ohio River Co-ops. The only types of organic produce available wholesale at that time were carrots, potatoes, and onions. After four years of such free-ranging, Jennifer returned to her studies at the nearby state university and, several degrees later, is now a professor of practice in the Department of Anthropology at Indiana University, where she teaches courses in communication and culture. She lives on the farm that her husband, Jeff Hartenfeld, established in 1977 as an organic specialty crop business that now sells primarily through a nearby farmers’ market. In 2007 Jennifer and Jeff wrote The Farmers’ Market Book: Growing Food, Cultivating Community, in which they describe in detail why farmers’ markets in the United States have boomed in recent years. Jennifer also publishes and speaks widely about teaching and learning in higher education. She served as president of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (2008–2011) and co-edits the Indiana University Press book series Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. Her concerns for sustainability and education have come together in such publications as Teaching Environmental Literacy across the Curriculum, which she co-edited with Heather Reynolds and Eduardo Brondízio in 2010.
James R. Farmer grew up surrounded by farms in east-central Indiana’s Wayne County, showing cows and hogs in 4-H, dairy judging in Future Farmers of America (FFA) contests, and working on neighboring farms. While farming has always been his ideal occupation, he does the next best thing—he studies it. James is an assistant professor of human ecology in the School of Public Health at Indiana University, where he focuses his scholarship and service on community food systems, sustainable agriculture, and natural resource sustainability. James formerly owned a CSA in Brown County, Indiana, was a high school agriculture teacher, and advised Miller Farm, the student-run agriculture living-and-learning cooperative at Earlham College. His recently completed studies include Assessing Local Foods in Indiana: Farmers’ Markets and Community Supported Agriculture; Overcoming the Market Barriers to Organic Production in West Virginia; Infusion or Assimilation: Barriers to the Integration of Local Food Systems across the Community; Community Orchards: Institutional Organization and Participant Outcomes; and Specialty Crops and High Tunnels: Evaluating Success and Building Future Capacity. His work on farmers’ markets and CSAs has been presented at national conferences and regional and state meetings as well as state and local extension programs. He is an associate editor for the Natural Areas Journal and a reviewer for several other scholarly publications, including the Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development; the Journal of Hunger and Environmental Nutrition; and Sustainability.
This book combines our experiences and our research in various places around the country, bringing them to life through in-depth examples based in two towns—Bloomington, Indiana, in the Midwest, and Huntington, West Virginia, in central Appalachia. These innovative exemplars underscore the idea that food operates as a system that includes not only individual growers and eaters—who are, of course, all of us—but also communities, technologies, and the natural environment. Together, these elements offer some counterintuitive and thought-provoking contrasts to suggest why local food has grown so prodigiously and how it can be sustained in the future. Through those examples and many others, we show how the major mechanisms in local food—especially farmers’ markets, community supported agriculture, food hubs, and digital networks—affect people.
We are building on Thomas A. Lyson’s work on “civic agriculture,” which describes the beneficial links between social and economic development when communities participate in local food.15 Writing in 2004, Lyson was an early observer of the phenomenon before it came to much attention by state and federal agencies or many scholars. He observes that a “you food” rhetoric manages to infiltrate some of the most standardized fast-food chain restaurants, with consumers “‘demanding’ food products tailored to their individual tastes and preferences,” even while industrial giants further entrench themselves in globalization, mechanization, and economies of scale. Burger King might promise that you can “have it your way,” but industry practices in fact “transformed from a more locally interdependent system of production and consumption to a more globally oriented system where production was uncoupled from consumption.”16 Our perspective here is much in concert with Lyson’s description of a civic agriculture that trumps strict economic determinism with pragmatic environmental sustainability, community building, ecological holism and process, developmental and equity orientations to decision making, dispersed economic power, and democratic political processes.17 Coming more than a decade later, we add to Lyson’s foundational discussion the significant diversification of iconic local food venues into a host of creative variations and offshoots. Moreover, Selling Local offers a more embodied approach to the people and places of community-based food, accounting for the realities they experience and that fundamentally contribute to local culture, economy, and environment.
While Selling Local is based on evidence of practice, its main focus is not how to work a farm or get into direct marketing. Many excellent publications exist on those subjects, including CSA: Organizing a Successful CSA, by Cathy Roth and Elizabeth Keen; The New Farmers’ Market: Farm Fresh Ideas for Producers, Managers and Communities, by Vance Corum, Marcie Rosenzweig, and Eric Gibson; Making Your Small Farm Profitable, by Ron Macher and Howard W. Kerr Jr.; and the periodical Growing for Market.18 These publications present practical advice to growers on what to grow; how to start, manage, and promote a direct-market farming business; and how to increase market share. In addition, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) regularly updates its instruction guides on its Agricultural Marketing Service site: https://www.ams.usda.gov.
Selling Local strategically develops comparative case studies in order to propose transferrable models of viable local food systems. Other books provide excellent concentration on a focused case or theoretical framework; for example, gender (Julie M. Parsons, Gender, Class and Food: Families, Bodies, and Health), economics (Remy Herrera and Kin Chi Lau, eds., The Struggle for Food Sovereignty: Alternative Development and the Renewal of Peasant Societies Today), global dispersion (James Farrer, ed., The Globalization of Asian Cuisines), public planning (Daniel Kemmis, The Good City and the Good Life, which examines farmers’ markets as one model for urban planning), public health (Julie Guthman, Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism, which brings to light the importance of looking beyond caloric intake and physical activity as the only explanatory measures connecting food and health), ecology (Gary Stephenson, Farmers’ Markets: Success, Failure, and Management Ecology, which examines ecological management, mostly in the Oregon region), and race (Alison Hope Alkon, Black, White, and Green, which analyzes race and ethnicity in two San Francisco area markets).19
And some organize around a single food, region, or venue. Comprehensive examinations of a single food include Sarah Bowen’s Divided Spirits: Tequila, Mezcal, and the Politics of Production, Antonio Mattozzi and Zachary Nowak’s Inventing the Pizzeria: A History of Pizza Making in Naples, and Gary Allen’s Sausage: A Global History. Many other books look at doughnuts, lamb, dumplings, carrots, and so on. The city of Chicago has its own “food biography” (Daniel Block and Howard Rosing’s Chicago: A Food Biography), markets and CSAs have their own books; among them are The Farmers’ Market Book: Growing Food, Cultivating Community, by Jennifer Meta Robinson and J. A. Hartenfeld, and Farms of Tomorrow Revisited: Community Supported Farms—Farm Supported Communities, by Trauger Groh and Steven McFadden.20
Figure I.1. Sustainability implicates overlapping areas of human-environment interaction. This Venn diagram is commonly used to describe the interdependence of these factors essential to sustainability. It is general enough to apply to areas with diverse economic, social, and ecological conditions while still posing sustainable development as a global objective.
Although Selling Local is informed by the authors’ personal experience in order to build a transferrable theory, other popular publications provide vivid memoirs or character studies to enliven local food issues. Barbara Kingsolver’s memoir Animal, Vegetable, Miracle has been widely heralded for introducing food politics to newcomers, and Novella Carpenter’s Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer profiles her experience raising vegetables and animals in her city yard in Oakland, California. In addition, books like Mary Carpenter and Quentin Carpenter’s The Dane County Farmers’ Market: A Personal History compiles a multifaceted portrait of the Madison, Wisconsin, market through numerous profiles of key people involved.21
Several unifying themes weave throughout this book. One is sustainability—of human effort, finances, and environment. Indeed, environmental sustainability has been defined as long-term “thriving within our means,” and it can be achieved by balancing environmental health, economic prosperity, and social equity.22 Proponents of local food often think of this movement as an important component of sustainability. During an era of climate change, it can help stabilize regional economies, both urban and rural, increase access to healthy foods, lower environmental consequences, and draw people into cooperative association with each other.
Another theme emphasizes making and sharing culture. Food is a particularly good medium for knowing ourselves and how we relate to the world around us—understanding our culture—because it is so central to sustaining life. Food creates bonds and distinctions among us that give shape to our lives. When people shop local food at centralized venues like farmers’ markets, they get drawn into contact with others—and then that same food helps them to navigate the social world.
Finally, systems thinking serves as an organizing theme throughout the book. Systems thinking about food connects people, practices, and places. It helps us to analyze institutions and design new ones. It asks us to consider the interconnected nature of life and reflect on how our choices affect the world.
The Chapters
Chapter 1 asks the question “Why Local and Why Now?” The multifaceted, counterintuitive answer offers a theoretical foundation for the detailed discussion in the following chapters. The word “local” sounds neighborly and nearby, but multimodal research suggests a bundled set of meanings with internal complications and contradictions. For those who use and care about local, its connotations are not only about proximity, as a lay definition of the word suggests, but also about reclaiming independent agency without renouncing a stake in shared common goods and resources. This chapter develops a theory of localism that is rooted in food politics, practices, and aspirations and that makes sense of apparent paradoxes.
Chapter 2, “Understanding Farmers’ Markets,” provides an overview of farmers’ markets, just one piece of a locally based agricultural system that includes CSAs, wholesale exchanges, food hubs, and other distribution schemes. Markets can be an especially stable sector because they are regular, visible, local, and peopled. That means they are especially well suited to help stabilize local economies, both urban and rural; increase access to healthy foods; lower environmental consequences; provide recreation; and draw people into association with one another. They can foster a sense of community that rests on belonging, responsibility, and reciprocity. The chapter introduces some of the main categories of farmers’ markets and summarizes research on customer demographics and market experiences. The information it provides allows market vendors, advocates, and administrators to build intentionally more robust and diverse markets that support community well-being.
Chapter 3, “Understanding Community Supported Agriculture,” outlines the appeal of CSAs to farmers and shareholders. It looks at CSA demographics around the country and the factors involved in making this relatively new addition to local food successful, considering both their management and the systemic barriers to participation that are implicit in common models. The chapter concludes with alternative approaches and innovations that broaden the accessibility of CSAs, remedying the exclusionary aspects that limit their growth and civic success.
Chapter 4, “What’s Next in Local Food?,” describes the emergence of major new outreach and aggregation systems, innovations in local, that will serve more people, broaden the impact, and help sustain the success of local food. These developments support new markets for small farmers and allow larger, institutional-type buyers to purchase locally. The chapter introduces several exemplars and discusses the factors involved in their commercial, communication, and community success. The distinction between recreation and leisure is used to explain both the local grower and the local eater. These lenses can support the growth of local food systems and their use in emergency relief, food hubs, urban agriculture, and expansion of the commons into this area. Finally, this chapter focuses on both mainstream and alternative innovations that hold promise for future needs.
Chapter 5, “Growing Capacity,” identifies some of the major challenges in scaling up production of local food. We know American farmers are aging. In recent years, their average age rose to fifty-eight while their overall numbers fell.23 At the same time, new farms tend to be diversified and smaller, with younger operators and more off-farm jobs to support them. Nationwide, midsize farms are getting squeezed out, with most farms either very large or very small in terms of output. Promising trends show an increase in women farmers and minority farmers, but these groups also face particular challenges, especially in acquiring land, an agricultural education, and a sense of community. The chapter explores the difficulties experienced by some new farmers and outlines the new educational opportunities and supportive policy groups putting local food in a good position to scale up.
Chapter 6, “A Systems Approach to Local Food,” proposes a new framework for shifting our understanding of food production, from a simple hierarchical structure to an integrated system. It uses case studies to create a model that represents complex phenomena in an abstract but simplified way, stepping back from the details to explain, essentially, how the world of food works.24 Expressed as a model, our theories of the world can be tested and refined against other examples, getting closer to accurate with each revision. Our model for local food proposes a map of relevant factors—as an explanation of how food systems work and as a realistic guide for how to support sustainable food in diverse human communities in ways that foster the ecological systems within which we live. The two case studies we have focused on show that a model can explain why counterintuitive situations sometimes succeed and thereby aid civic planning.
The conclusion identifies major lessons for the future of local food. By understanding that we are embedded in systems, together we can enter into design and action with broad goals for the well-being of people and the sustainability of the environment in mind.
Eating is an agricultural act we all share. Our common need for food blurs distinctions among people and expands our sense of relationship and responsibility for the production of healthful and environmentally sound sustenance. By beginning with the best information from research and experience, we can recommend practices that will support farmers, community activists, and educators as they work toward a sustainable and humane future. College students and instructors in fields like agriculture, anthropology, environmental studies, food studies, geography, natural resource management, recreation, sociology, sustainability, and tourism will find this introduction to selling local to be timely and comprehensive. Selling local—the food and the idea—offers a way to resolve common disconnects between growers and eaters, farmers and scholars, practitioners and policy makers.
Because of its current popularity, the topic of selling locally is something of a moving target: traditional sensibilities of place and belonging are being innovatively advanced by new communication technologies, such as social networking, just-in-time ordering, and geographic information system (GIS) technology. Getting beyond breaking news stories and personality-filled features, Selling Local offers a lasting foundation that transcends the moment and will continue to be useful as new trends and theories of local food emerge. Let us begin by asking why local and why now?
Notes
1. Wendell Berry, What Are People For? Essays by Wendell Berry (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2010), 145.
2. Jennifer Meta Robinson, “Making the Land Connection: Local Food Farms and Sustainability of Place,” in The Greening of Everyday Life: Challenging Practices, Imaging Possibilities, edited by Jens Kersten and John M. Meyer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Thomas A. Lyson, Civic Agriculture: Reconnecting Farm, Food, and Community (Boston: Tufts University Press, 2004).
3. Jennifer Meta Robinson and J. A. Hartenfeld, The Farmers’ Market Book: Growing Food, Cultivating Community (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 36–45; Tracey Deutsch, Building a Housewife’s Paradise: Gender, Politics, and American Grocery Stores in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
4. Russ Parsons, “The Idea That Shook the World,” Los Angeles Times, May 24, 2006, http://articles.latimes.com/2006/may/24/food/fo-farmer24.
5. Sam Jones, “More Than 1,000 New Farmers Markets Recorded across Country as USDA Directory Reveals 17 Percent Growth,” United States Department of Agriculture, http://www.usda.gov/wps/portal/usda/usdahome?contentid=2011/08/0338.xml.
6. United States Department of Agriculture (hereafter, USDA), “Local Food Research and Development,” http://www.ams.usda.gov/AMSv1.0/FoodHubs.
7. USDA, “Community Supported Agriculture,” USDA National Agricultural Library, http://www.nal.usda.gov/afsic/pubs/csa/csa.shtml.
8. Steven McFadden, “Community Farms in the 21st Century: Poised for Another Wave of Growth?,” Rodale Institute, http://newfarm.rodaleinstitute.org/features/0104/csa-history/part1.shtml.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.; Local Harvest, “Community Supported Agriculture,” http://www.localharvest.org/csa.
11. National Good Food Network, “Food Hub Center,” http://www.ngfn.org/resources/food-hubs.
12. Todd M. Schmit et al., “Assessing the Economic Impacts of Regional Food Hubs: The Case of Regional Access,” Northeast SARE, 2013, http://www.nesare.org/Dig-Deeper/Useful-resources/SARE-Project-Products/Northeast-SARE-Project-Products/Assessing-the-Economic-Impacts-of-Regional-Food-Hubs-the-Case-of-Regional-Access; Clare Thompson, “Food Hubs: How Small Farmers Get to Market,” Grist, http://grist.org/locavore/food-hubs-how-small-farmers-get-to-market.
13. James Matson, Martha Sullins, and Chris Cook, “The Role of Food Hubs in Local Food Marketing,” USDA Rural Development Service Report 73, January 2013, http://www.rd.usda.gov/files/sr73.pdf.
14. United Nations, “UN Projects World Population to Reach 8.5 Billion by 2030, Driven by Growth in Developing Countries,” Sustainable Development blog, July 29, 2015; United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, World Urbanization Prospects: The 2014 Revision (New York: United Nations, 2014), https://esa.un.org/unpd/wup/Publications/Files/WUP2014-Highlights.pdf.
15. Lyson, Civic Agriculture.
16. Ibid., 2–5.
17. Ibid., 70–78.
18. Cathy Roth and Elizabeth Keen, CSA: Organizing a Successful CSA, 1999, https://www.uvm.edu/~susagctr/resources/CSA.pdf; Vance Corum, Marcie Rosenzweig, and Eric Gibson, The New Farmers’ Market: Farm Fresh Ideas for Producers, Managers and Communities (Auburn, CA: New World Publishing, 2001); Ron Macher and Howard W. Kerr Jr., Making Your Small Farm Profitable (North Adams, MA: Storey Books, 1999); Growing for Market (growingformarket.com).
19. Julie M. Parsons, Gender, Class and Food: Families, Bodies and Health (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Remy Herrera and Kin Chi Lau, eds., The Struggle for Food Sovereignty: Alternative Development and the Renewal of Peasant Societies Today (London: Pluto Press, 2015); James Farrer, ed. The Globalization of Asian Cuisines (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Daniel Kemmis, The Good City and the Good Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995); Julie Guthman, Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Gary Stephenson, Farmers’ Markets: Success, Failure, and Management Ecology (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2008).
20. Sarah Bowen, Divided Spirits: Tequila, Mezcal, and the Politics of Production (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015); Antonio Mattozzi, Inventing the Pizzeria: A History of Pizza Making in Naples, ed. and trans. Zachary Nowak (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015); Gary Allen, Sausage: A Global History (London: Reaktion, 2015); Daniel Block and Howard Rosing, Chicago: A Food Biography (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015), Robinson and Hartenfeld, Farmers’ Market Book; and Trauger Groh and Steven McFadden, Farms of Tomorrow Revisited: Community Supported Farms—Farm Supported Communities (Kimberton, PA: Biodynamic Farming and Gardening Association, 1998).
21. Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (New York: HarperCollins, 2007); Novella Carpenter, Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer (New York: Penguin, 2010); Mary Carpenter and Quentin Carpenter, The Dane County Farmers’ Market: A Personal History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003).
22. Indiana University Office of Sustainability, “Sustainability Defined,” http://sustain.indiana.edu/overview/sustainability.php.
23. USDA, “Farm Demographics—US Farmers by Gender, Age, Race, Ethnicity, and More,” 2012 Census Highlights, May 2014, https://www.agcensus.usda.gov/Publications/2012/Online_Resources/Highlights/Farm_Demographics. The Agricultural Census of 2012 showed that the total number of principal operators had dropped 4.3 percent from 2007. This is the most recent census available at our time of publication.
24. Timothy Wilson and David Gilbert, “Affective Forecasting,” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 35 (2003): 345–411; Barbara Crawford and Rebecca C. Jordan, “Inquiry, Models, and Complex Reasoning to Transform Learning in Environmental Education,” in Transdisciplinary Research in Environmental Education, edited by Marianne E. Krasny and Justin Dillon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013); Amanda E. Sorensen et al., “Model-Based Reasoning to Foster Environmental and Socio-scientific Literacy in Higher Education,” Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences 6, no. 2 (2015): 287–94.
