Eating Places: Food Systems, Narratives, Networks, and Spaces

Abstract

An increasing number of design and research projects in landscape architecture address issues of food and its relationship to landscape. The production, distribution, processing, marketing, consumption, and disposal of food have consequences for landscape processes and places. This paper articulates how food and landscape are mutually constituted through shared ecological, social, and spatial systems. It outlines ways of representing and shaping the relationships between food and landscape using a framework of food systems, narratives, networks, and spaces. This framework opens multiple, broad range strategies for shaping food and landscapes beyond site-based projects. It argues that designers should expand practice from an emphasis on local food strategies of productive spaces to <i>respatialize</i> the logistical spaces of aggregation and distribution in order make significant structural change in both landscape and food systems.