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Purpose
This Website explores the connections between people, place, and food. Food and farming are more than matters of nutrition and labor, more than issues of consumption and production. The food that we eat is absorbed into our cells; it becomes our blood, our bones, and our little grey cells. What we eat, how we eat, when we eat, where we eat, with whom we eat are all things that we learn. In the eating and the learning, we are connected to others as well as to our food supply. Food, then, becomes us and defines us, literally and figuratively; thus, the more local our food, the more it can teach us and engage us in the process of knowing and growing ourselves.
Farming, likewise, is learned. It embodies the history of a people interacting with the land, dependent upon the natural features and forces that exist in any particular place. The wisdom of how to farm in place is built upon daily activity and lived experience; it is also shared across generations. In this way, it becomes part of the ongoing cultural repertoire that defines a landscape and a way of life. When people move, they carry these understandings with them in the form of seeds and symbols, stories, songs, and cuisines. Such things remind them of who they are and where they belong. They are sources of life-giving biological and cultural diversity.
This Website offers examples of the cultural and place-based nature of food and farming. It provides illustrations of how people – in a variety of settings using indigenous and contemporary understandings – express their relationship to place and to food systems in place. It is our aim to highlight the role that culture plays in the creation and maintenance of these local food systems. We want to re-attach food and farming to history, memory, language, storytelling, folklore, art, ritual, etc. – tools, as important as forks, knives, and plows, for “grounding” people in their communities and neighborhoods of place.