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.
Community-supported agriculture 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.
A farmers' market is a physical retail marketplace intended to sell foods directly by farmers to consumers. Farmers' markets may be indoors or outdoors and typically consist of booths, tables or stands where farmers sell their produce, live animals and plants, and sometimes prepared foods and beverages. Farmers' markets exist in many countries worldwide and reflect the local culture and economy. The size of the market may be just a few stalls or it may be as large as several city blocks. Due to their nature, they tend to be less rigidly regulated than retail produce shops.
Alice Louise Waters is an American chef, restaurateur, food writer, and author. In 1971, she opened Chez Panisse, a restaurant in Berkeley, California, famous for its role in creating the farm-to-table movement and for pioneering California cuisine.
California cuisine is a food movement that originated in Northern California. The cuisine focuses on dishes that are driven by local and sustainable ingredients with an attention to seasonality and an emphasis on the bounty of the region.
Chez Panisse is a Berkeley, California, restaurant, known as one of the originators of California cuisine and the farm-to-table movement, opened and owned by Alice Waters. The restaurant emphasizes ingredients rather than technique and has developed a supply network of direct relationships with local farmers, ranchers and dairies.
Odessa Piper is an American restaurateur and chef.
California-style pizza is a style of pizza that combines New York and Italian thin crust with toppings from the California cuisine cooking style. Its invention is generally attributed to chef Ed LaDou, and Chez Panisse, in Berkeley, California. Wolfgang Puck, after meeting LaDou, popularized the style of pizza in the rest of the country. It is served in many California cuisine restaurants. California Pizza Kitchen, Round Table Pizza, Extreme Pizza, and Sammy's Woodfired Pizza are four major pizza franchises associated with California-style pizza.
The food industry is a complex, global network of diverse businesses that supplies most of the food consumed by the world's population. The food industry today has become highly diversified, with manufacturing ranging from small, traditional, family-run activities that are highly labour-intensive, to large, capital-intensive and highly mechanized industrial processes. Many food industries depend almost entirely on local agriculture, animal farms, produce, and/or fishing.
Food miles is the distance food is transported from the time of its making until it reaches the consumer. Food miles are one factor used when testing the environmental impact of food, such as the carbon footprint of the food.
Sprouts Farmers Market, Inc., is a supermarket chain headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona. The grocer offers a wide selection of natural and organic foods, including fresh produce, bulk foods, vitamins and supplements, packaged groceries, meat, poultry, seafood, deli, baked goods, dairy products, frozen foods, natural body care, and household items. Sprouts employs 35,000 workers and operates more than 400 stores in 23 states.
Civic agriculture is the trend towards locally based agriculture and food production that is tightly linked to a community's social and economic development. It is also connected to the citizenship and environmentalism within a community. Civic agriculture is geared towards meeting consumer demands in addition to boosting the local economy in the process through jobs, farm to food production efforts, and community sustainability. The term was first coined by Thomas Lyson, professor of sociology at Cornell, to represent an alternative means of sustainability for rural agricultural communities in the era of industrialized agriculture. Civic agriculture is geared towards fostering a self sustainable local economy through an integral community structure in which the entire community is in some part responsible for their food production. Civic agriculture can provide a variety of benefits to a community such as cleaner water, fresher foods, and a better connection between farmers and the community. However, there are also critiques that are concerned with the way in which civic agriculture promotes community responsibility and possibly creates a false sense of citizenship. The intent of civic agricultural practices is to move away from the industrialized sector and into a localized community effort.
The Gourmet Ghetto is a colloquial name for the business district of the North Berkeley neighborhood in the city of Berkeley, California, known as the birthplace of California cuisine. Other developments that can be traced to this neighborhood include specialty coffee, the farm-to-table and local food movements, the rise to popularity in the U.S. of chocolate truffles and baguettes, the popularization of the premium restaurant designed around an open kitchen, and the California pizza made with local produce. After coalescing in the mid-1970s as a culinary destination, the neighborhood received its "Gourmet Ghetto" nickname in the late 1970s from comedian Darryl Henriques. Early, founding influences were Peet's Coffee, Chez Panisse and the Cheese Board Collective. Alice Medrich began her chain of Cocolat chocolate stores there.
The Culinary Revolution was a movement during the late 1960s and 1970s, when sociopolitical issues began to profoundly affect the way Americans eat. The Culinary Revolution is often credited to Alice Waters, the owner of Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley, California.
Tom Chino is a farmer based in Rancho Santa Fe, California. He is a member of the Chino family which includes 8 brothers and sisters. Most well known are Koo, Kay, Fred, and Frank who live on the farm and work with Tom Chino. The family is known for revolutionizing the small farm business. Alice Waters of Chez Panisse helped the Chino family to rise to their elevated status in the food world. She began the slow food movement to use local farms and fresh produce to create organic and less commercial restaurants. Other patrons of the Chino farm include Wolfgang Puck. Locally, the most predominate patrons are Chef Martin Woesle from restaurant Mille Fleurs who has been followed by Market chef Carl Shroeder, George's California Modern led by chef Trey Forshee, and Arterra led by chef Jason Maitland.
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.
A foodshed is the geographic region that produces the food for a particular population. The term is used to describe a region of food flows, from the area where it is produced, to the place where it is consumed, including: the land it grows on, the route it travels, the markets it passes through, and the tables it ends up on. "Foodshed" is described as a "socio-geographic space: human activity embedded in the natural integument of a particular place." A foodshed is analogous to a watershed in that foodsheds outline the flow of food feeding a particular population, whereas watersheds outline the flow of water draining to a particular location. Through drawing from the conceptual ideas of the watershed, foodsheds are perceived as hybrid social and natural constructs.
A broad range of food production-distribution-consumption configurations can be characterised as short food supply chains (SFSCs), such as farmers' markets, farm shops, collective farmers' shops, community-supported agriculture and solidarity purchase groups. More generally, a food supply chain can be defined as "short" when it is characterized by short physical distance or involvement of few intermediaries between producers and consumers. Being used interchangeably, alternative food networks fall under the same umbrella as SFSCs. Often guided by principles of sustainability, SFSCs are shaped by recent international policy frameworks. While SFSCs boast strengths, they also encounter challenges in their operations.
LYFE Kitchen is an American fast-casual restaurant chain operating in Illinois. The company's name is an acronym that stands for "Love Your Food Everyday". LYFE promises functional, locally sourced foods and does not use artificial ingredients. They strive to use 100% biodegradable, compostable, recyclable packaging.
A food hub, as defined by the USDA, is “a centrally located facility with a business management structure facilitating the aggregation, storage, processing, distributions, and/or marketing of locally/regionally produced food products.” Food hubs are a part of the agricultural value chain model and often share common values relating to conservation, sustainability, healthy food access, and supporting local farmers. A defining characteristic of food hubs is source identification, a food safety and marketing benefit that allows consumers to trace the origin of products they buy. One of the primary goals of food hubs is to give small and medium-sized farmers access to larger or additional markets. Food hubs also fill gaps in food systems infrastructure, such as transportation, product storage, and product processing. Although companies and organizations that fit the USDA definition have been operating in the United States since at least the early 1970s, most food hubs, as well as the common use of the term, started in or after 2008.
