Local food is food that is produced within a short distance of where it is consumed, often accompanied by a social structure and supply chain different from the large-scale supermarket system.
Local food (or locavore) movements aim to connect food producers and consumers in the same geographic region, to develop more self-reliant and resilient food networks; improve local economies; or to affect the health, environment, community, or society of a particular place. The term has also been extended to include not only the geographic location of supplier and consumer but can also be "defined in terms of social and supply chain characteristics." For example, local food initiatives often promote sustainable and organic farming practices, although these are not explicitly related to the geographic proximity of producer and consumer.
Local food represents an alternative to the global food model, which often sees food traveling long distances before it reaches the consumer.
In the USA, the local food movement has been traced to the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933, which spawned agricultural subsidies and price supports. The contemporary American movement can be traced back to proposed resolutions to the Society for Nutrition Education's 1981 guidelines. In 1994, Chicago pop culture made local food a trend in the Midwest. These largely unsuccessful resolutions encouraged increased local production to slow farmland loss. The program described "sustainable diets" - a term then new to the American public. At the time, the resolutions were met with strong criticism from pro-business institutions, but have had a strong resurgence of backing since 2000.
In 2008, the United States farm bill was revised to emphasise nutrition: "it provides low-income seniors with vouchers for use at local produce markets, and it added more than $1 billion to the fresh fruit and vegetable program, which serves healthy snacks to 3 million low-income children in schools".
No single definition of local food systems exists.
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The Transition Workshop2_ Design Studio is the second practical part of a complete interdisciplinary and intensive training on the pathways for decarbonizing and resilient cities and regions, entitled
Slow Food is an organization that promotes local food and traditional cooking. It was founded by Carlo Petrini in Italy in 1986 and has since spread worldwide. Promoted as an alternative to fast food, it strives to preserve traditional and regional cuisine and encourages farming of plants, seeds, and livestock characteristic of the local ecosystem. It promotes local small businesses and sustainable foods. It also focuses on food quality, rather than quantity. It was the first established part of the broader slow movement.
The term food system describes the interconnected systems and processes that influence nutrition, food, health, community development, and agriculture. A food system includes all processes and infrastructure involved in feeding a population: growing, harvesting, processing, packaging, transporting, marketing, consumption, distribution, and disposal of food and food-related items. It also includes the inputs needed and outputs generated at each of these steps.
Community-supported agriculture (CSA model) or cropsharing is a system that connects producers and consumers within the food system closer by allowing the consumer to subscribe to the harvest of a certain farm or group of farms. It is an alternative socioeconomic model of agriculture and food distribution that allows the producer and consumer to share the risks of farming. The model is a subcategory of civic agriculture that has an overarching goal of strengthening a sense of community through local markets.
Following a manifold of food traces, we propose to think of an architecture of environmentality. Space, and our agency within it, is increasingly defined by the design of ecologies of signals – biological, social and machinic – that orient and organize bod ...
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In this work, we demonstrate that GaN can be directly grown at high temperature on Si(111) substrates by metalorganic CVD without using any intentional AlN buffer, by simply employing a trimethylaluminum (TMAl) preflow. We found that n-GaN layers directly ...
This work is a continuation of the Enoncé Théorique, Matters of Care: About the Entanglements of Waters and More-Than-Human Worlds, which explores how caring about water can help us understand the intertwining of our environments and identify the places in ...
Explores the Solagro project and the challenges of ecological transition in Grand Genève, emphasizing the importance of defining collective goals and sustainable agriculture.