Iowa
place-based foods
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the full report
Place-based foods have
a unique taste that often has to do with an ecological niche
and/or the ethnic or regional heritage of their producers. These
are the foods that we seek out to eat locally when we visit
a particular place, purchase as souvenirs or gifts, or hunt
down in specialty shops. Food is not just about sustenance
~ we want
foods that have a story.
During
2005 and 2006, the Iowa Foodways Project: Taste of Place surveyed
the state to locate and document a variety of foods and the
people who produce them. The goal was and is to identify and
document those foods that can be distinguished as uniquely Iowan
in heritage (whether historical, ethnic, ecological, or geographic).
Politics ~
local, regional, and global ~
make
defining place-based foods not easy to put into words, even
though identifying a food as place-based may be as deceptively
simple and as inherently complex as you know it when you see
it. More
This
project was funded by two competitive grants from the Leopold
Center for Sustainable Agriculture as part of its Marketing
and Food Systems Initiative. The Leopold Center is interested
in place-based Iowa foods because they could provide new markets
for farmers and processors who produce them.
For
general information on the project, download:
Taste
of Place: Iowa's Food Culture and Heritage.
