Coming in to the Foodshed

Bioregionalists have championed the utility ofthe concept ofthe watershed as an organizingframeworkfor thought and action directed to understanding and implementing appropriate and respectful human interaction with particular pieces of land. In a creative analogue to the watershed, permaculturist Arthur Cetz has recently introduced the term "foodshed" to facilitate critical thought about where our food is coming from and how it is getting to us. We find the 'joodshed" to be a particularly rich and evocative metaphor; but it is much more than metaphor. Like its analogue the watershed, the foodshed can serve us as a conceptual and methodological unit ofanalysis that provides a frame for action as well as thought. Food comes to most of us now through a global food system that is destructive ofboth natural and social communities. In this article we explore a variety of routes for the conceptual and practical elaboration of the foodshed. While corporations that are the principal beneficiaries of a global food system now dominate the production. processing, distribution, and consumption offood. alternatives are emerging that together could form the basis for foodshed development. Just as many farmers are recognizing the social and environmental advantages to sustainable agriculture, so are many consumers coming to appreciate the benefits offresh and sustainably produced food. Such producers and consumers are being linked through such innovative arrangements as community supported agriculture and farmers markets. Alternative producers, alternative consumers, and alternative small entrepreneurs are rediscovering community and finding common ground in municipal and community food councils. Recognition of one's residence within afoodshed can confer a sense of connection and responsibility to a particular locality. The foodshed can provide a place for us to ground ourselves in the biological and social realities of living on the land andfrom the land in a place that we can call home, a place to which we are or can become native. . . . to draw in our economic boundaries and food system. In any supermarket here in Madison, shorten our supply lines so as to permit us literally Wisconsin. we can find tomatoes from Mexico, grapes to know where we are economically. The closer we from Chile, lettuce from California. apples from New live to the ground that we live from, the more we Zealand. And, in what we take to be an indicator of a will know about our economic life; the more we developing slippage between the terms "sustainable" know about our economic life. the more able we and "organic," we can even buy organic blackberries will be to take responsibility for it. Wendell Berry (1992: 35) from Guatemala (which may be organically produced but in all likelihood are not sustainably produced if the For virtually everyone in the North and for many term sustainable is understood to encompass more in the South, to eat is to participate in a truly global than on-farm production practices and any reasonable