The Growing Food Connections Essential Food Systems Reader is a collection of published resources that explore local and regional level public policy challenges and opportunities related to the following issues:
- Community food production: efforts to grow, raise and harvest crops, raise animals, fish, hunt or forage food for human consumption in urban, suburban and rural areas
- Community food security: the state in which all members of a community have sufficient and adequate access to healthy, affordable and culturally acceptable food, particularly under-served residents in urban, suburban and rural areas
- Community food connections: the challenges and opportunities of simultaneously improving community food production viability and food security for under-served residents.
The Essential Food Systems Reader includes carefully selected professional reports and articles, books, peer-reviewed journal articles and other resources such as fact sheets, briefing papers and white papers from the American Planning Association, the American Farmland Trust, and other national membership organizations, federal agencies and non-profit organizations. Unlike traditional food systems bibliographies, the Essential Food Systems Reader focuses on resources related to public policy, and the role of the local or regional government in improving community food production and community food security. Collectively, the Essential Food Systems Reader provides a foundation of knowledge on these topics – a starting place for communities wishing to tackle these important issues.
Is Your Town Farm-Friendly?
May 26, 2016
A helpful checklist that provides guidance on local government-level policies that support local farms. The checklist is a useful snapshot for farm-friendly policies.
Cultivating Maine’s Agricultural Future: A Guide for Towns, Land Trusts and Farm Supporters
May 24, 2016
This publication draws from many of the approaches and tools already employed in the state of Maine to support local agriculture and food production, as well as tools from other...
Slowing Down Fast Food: A policy guide for healthier kids and families
August 4, 2015
This report focuses on local policy approaches that address fast food. Four policy approaches are addressed: school policy, “healthy” zoning, curbing kid-focused marketing, and redirecting subsidies to healthier businesses, which...
Urban Agriculture as an Emergent Land Use: Case Studies of Municipal Responsiveness
September 22, 2014
Though the term “urban agriculture” sounds like an oxymoron, agriculture in an urban context is not a new concept, nor is it as radical as it seems. Developed and developing...
Increasing Farm Income and Local Food Access: A Case Study of a Collaborative Aggregation, Marketing, and Distribution Strategy that Links Farmers to Markets
January 1, 1970
This article reviews the development and outcomes of the Intervale Food Hub in Burlington, Vermont using a participatory action research approach. The authors suggest that the case study offers promising...
Practicing Food Democracy: A Pragmatic Politics of Transformation
January 1, 1970
This article explores the tensions between stakeholders of the alternative agrifood movement. The author makes the case for
Shifting Plates in the Agrifood Landscape: The Tectonics of Alternative Agrifood Initiatives in California
January 1, 1970
This article reviews the discussion of agrifood initiatives within the academic literature, analyzes the history of such initiatives in the context of California, and discusses the results of the researchers.
The Food System: A Stranger to the Planning Field
January 1, 1970
This article, widely regarded as a seminal piece of food systems literature and research, helped spark conversations about food within the planning field at the turn of the twenty-first century....
Building a Common Table: The Role for Planning in Community Food Systems
January 1, 1970
This article analyzes the various tensions and complementarities of the global industrialized food system and the alternative food system from the perspectives of the stakeholders involved. The author illustrates how...
Avoiding the Local Trap: Scale and Food Systems in Planning Research
January 1, 1970
This article encourages food systems advocates to move away from the misguided notion that local food systems are superior to larger scale food systems. The article asserts that outcomes such...
