Public History and the Food Movement

Public History and the Food Movement, published in 2018 by Routledge. The beautiful cover image was taken by photographer Jeremy Mundth. It shows an outdoor art piece entitled “Cribs,” created by artist Brenda Baker for the Wormfarm Institute‘s Farm/Art DTour at its annual Fermentation Fest in Wisconsin.

Public History and the Food Movement set out a rationale and a roadmap for historic sites to partner with present-day food system projects. As we wrote in the Introduction, our hope was to “create a framework for bringing together [two] seemingly incompatible things—the long, slow perspective of history and the pressing need to act—and to show why food is an exceptional vehicle for bridging the gap between them.”

The book incorporated interviews with people whose work showed us some of the possibilities (and sometimes also the limitations and challenges) within the still-to-be-explored areas between historic preservation/interpretation and real-world food ventures. Click on their names to see some of the insights they shared with us.

Rolf Diamant  *  Brian Donahue  *  Niaz Dorry  *  Anne Effland  *  Lisa Junkin Lopez  *  Darwin Kelsey  *  Valerie Segrest  *  Severine von Tscharner Fleming