Foodshed

A foodshed is the 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.

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.

It is can pertain to the area from which an individual or population receives a particular type of food, or the collective area from which an individual or population receives all of their food.

The modern United States foodshed, as an example, spans the entire world as the foods available in the typical supermarket have traveled from all over the globe, often long distances from where they were produced.

Origin

The term was coined in 1929 in the book How Great Cities Are Fed by W.P. Hedden [1], who was at the time, Chief of the Bureau of Commerce for the Port of New York Authority [2]. The term has more recently been reintroduced by permaculturist Arthur Getz, in his 1991 article “Urban Foodsheds” in Permaculture Activist [3].

In How Great Cities Are Fed, Hedden contrasts foodsheds with watersheds by noting that “the barriers which deflect raindrops into one river basin rather than into another are natural land elevations, while the barriers which guide and control movements of foodstuffs are more often economic than physical.”

Modern Usage and the Local Foods Movement

The term foodshed has recently been resurrected, particularly in local food movements throughout the world, as a useful term to describe and promote more sustainable ways of producing , distributing, and consuming food.

Local foods movements are often interested in scaling-back foodsheds from the global scale to the regional or local scale. Those within local foods movements cite the benefits to smaller foodsheds, including (but not limited to): fresher foods, stimulating the local economy, establishing a rapport directly with those who produce their food, reduction in resources (e.g. packaging, fuel) since transport of food is shorter and more direct to consumers, and the subsequent pollution reductions that go along with shorter transport.

References

The Foodshed: A Powerful Food Policy Concept

Coming in to the Foodshed

Walter P. Hedden (1929), How great cities are fed, Boston: D.C. Heath and Company, OCLC 3714302

A 1930 review of How Great Cities Are Fed from The Journal of Business of the University of Chicago