Articles and tools

Academic articles about foodsheds and local food systems

These files may take several minutes to download.

• Coming into the Foodshed (67K)


• Getting it Straight Before We Eat Ourselves to Death: From Food System to Foodshed in the 21st Century (18K)


• Tasting Food, Tasting Sustainability: Defining the Attributes of an Alternative Food System with Competent, Ordinary People (64K)


• That We All Might Eat: Regionally-Reliant Food Systems for the 21st Century (34K)


• Where the Grass Grows Again: Knowledge Exchange in the Sustainable Agriculture Movement (90K)

Price Tags/Cost Tags

If the price of our food reflected the environmental, social and health costs of food production...we’d pay a lot more for it. The Price Tags/Cost Tags describe many of the hidden costs of commonly eaten foods and encourage eaters to seek out more sustainable alternatives.

Perfect for direct marketing enterprises, food co-ops and CSA bags, the series includes apples, beer, chicken, coffee, corn, dairy products, eggs, hamburgers, potatoes, soda pop, strawberries, tomatoes and water.

A companion piece, the Power Eater's Guide to Organic and Sustainable Food, provides background information on sustainable eating.

The Price Tags/Cost Tags and Power Eater's Guide are saved as PDF files. Once downloaded, they can be photocopied onto heavy paper or cardstock for distribution. Note that there are two tags per page, and they need to be cut in half (each tag is 4.25" wide x 11" tall). Please feel free to copy and distribute them freely!

Meal Tickets

• Food and energy: Another way to count calories (Meal ticket #1)
• Your consumer food dollar: How does it carve up? (Meal ticket #2)

Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems publications

You can search a wide range of publications on sustainable and organic agriculture on the CIAS web site. This includes The Wisconsin Foodshed, which is a series of newsletters for people working to create sustainable food systems.