Foodshed

The term foodshed describes the geographic area from which food flows into a community. It is analogous to a watershed—the catchment area for rainfall. A foodshed includes the rural and urban farmland, processing and distribution facilities, transportation systems, and wholesalers and retailers that make up a region's food system. Natural features like soils, topography, and land cover, as well as constructed infrastructure and public policies, determine the shape, size, and productive capacity of both foodsheds and watersheds. In recent years, the foodshed has been used to describe any localized food system that serves as an alternative to the global food marketplace.

A variety of benefits are attributed to a productive foodshed that can supply a particular community with some or most of its nutritional needs. These include energy and material efficiency, because of the shorter distance between producers and consumers, and decreased need for processing and packaging; improved taste and nutritional quality of foodstuffs that are able to be harvested at peak ripeness with minimal chemical or mechanical processing; regional farmland preservation, and the continued viability of small and medium-size family farms near cities; community food security in both urban centers and rural farming communities as a result of a thriving regional agriculture sector; and closer relationships between producers and consumers that also improves democratic decision making, trust, and accountability among individuals within the food system. To advocates of preserving cultural traditions, unique heritage breeds, heirloom fruits and vegetables, and established culinary techniques, the foodshed represents a place with distinctive physical and cultural characteristics (i.e., terroir).

The first use of the term foodshed is generally attributed to Walter P. Hedden, who in 1929 wrote about New York City's food supply in How Great Cities Are Fed. Hedden described the sources of the foods eaten by New Yorkers, the paths of food from producer to consumer, and the factors that directed the flow of food to the city's consumers. In contrast to New York's “milkshed,” a relatively small, well-defined region circumscribed by the short distance that milk could be safely and cost-effectively transported in 1929, Hedden noted that the city's overall foodshed had become quite expansive, with fruits and vegetables traveling an average distance of 1,500 miles from farm to table—a figure still used today to emphasize that food travels great distances from farm to table.

Concerns about food security made the foodshed concept particularly salient in the 1920s. In October 1921, a planned nationwide railroad strike made real the possibility that an urban area as large as New York City, dependent on distant food supplies, would [Page 206]be at risk if those supplies were cut off and revealed that little attention had been paid to understanding and protecting the sources of food for New York and other U.S. cities. Metropolitan areas like New York also began to experience increased displacement of farmers by suburban residential development and, consequently, a sharp decline in the numbers of farmers selling directly to the public at city farmers markets. Expanding agricultural production in California and the South, coupled with improved transportation technologies and the rise of middlemen to broker and distribute shipments from producer to consumer, lengthened the distance from which perishable food, including milk, meat, and fresh produce, could be delivered to urban markets and increased the number of intermediaries in the supply chain. These changes made large cities like New York increasingly dependent on—and vulnerable to—disruptions in the food supply.

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