Project Details

For the past several years, students and faculty in the Department of Urban and Environmental Planning have planned and conducted a “100 Mile Thanksgiving” – a variation on the usual thanksgiving feast where, as much as possible, the food comes from within 100 miles of UVA. From this experience and from classes on food system planning offered in the program, we have learned a number of things. One important and perhaps surprising insight is that there is often a great deal of local food available in most regions. Another is that local food is a fragile enterprise, and that communities need to nurture and strengthen the ties between consumers and producers. Small grants to support Community Supported Agriculture, or to help farmers convert from conventional to ecological growing methods, would be helpful. So would rewriting regulations that discourage local processing and selling, and also encouraging municipalities to buy local. Our university dinner highlights not only what is available but also what is difficult or impossible to find, which underscores that most local food systems are now fractured and incomplete. One of the important planning projects of the next decades will be to reconnect the parts of these systems and to build back the missing components of mid-scale agriculture including the mills, dairies, abattoirs and processors that have closed and been replaced by centralized facilities. A fuller description of our experience can be found in PLACES found at http://places.designobserver.com/feature/the-100-mile-thanksgiving/11307/