Appalachian Staple Foods Collaborative Project

Our local and regional food systems are predominately modeled on a failed market based economy. In the absence of corporate accountability, and/or support on the federal policy level, local and regional leadership and self-governance is critical to the scaling across and evolution of a moral food economy. 

This project, designed to explore critical food systems theory in a mixed methodological context, asks what constitutes “leadership practice” in self-organized local and regional food networks? Leadership that weaves a network to bridge and support values-based food economies and alternatives to the market driven system. The experiences, interests, activities, and practices of the farmers, millers, entreprenuers, and others in the Appalachian Staple Foods Collaborative (ASFC) were mapped to create an interconnected database.

The analysis of the network mapping results will assist ASFC in communications and greater digital networking capability, learning opportunities and more. It will also create new knowledge within the study of food systems. It will contribute to the discourse related to the potential for complex, self-organized leadership structures within community-based food systems networks to demonstrate rhizomatic characteristics which create participatory, multi-scalar, and effective pathways for change.