Philip Ackerman-Leist: Rebuilding the foodshed: how to create local, sustainable, and secure food systems: Chelsea Green Publishing, White River Junction, Vermont, 2013, 360 pp, ISBN: 1-60358-423-4

Agric Hum Values (2016) 33:10111012 DOI 10.1007/s10460-016-9728-x

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Web End = Philip Ackerman-Leist: Rebuilding the foodshed: how to create local, sustainable, and secure food systems

Chelsea Green Publishing, White River Junction, Vermont, 2013, 360 pp, ISBN: 1-60358-423-4

Mark Paul1

Accepted: 17 August 2016 / Published online: 5 October 2016 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016

The local food movement has garnered much support as a viable alternative to the industrial food system over the past two decades. While many advocates of local food have focused on narrow denitions of local, Philip Ackerman-Leist provides a broad overview to diversify and rebuild our local food systems in his book Rebuilding the Food-shed: How to Create Local, Sustainable, and Secure Food Systems.

The book consists of 14 chapters broken down into three parts: dilemmas, drivers for rebuilding local food systems, and new directions. In Part One (Chapters 13) Ackerman-Leist addresses the key challenges and questions in understanding and describing local food systems. This brief section provides key insight into building a theory of resilient food systems centered around community. While researchers and activists have struggled to clearly dene local, he argues that we are clear on one thing: the nucleus for local foods is ultimately the table (p. 3). His critique of food miles (a mile over which a food item is transported from producer to consumer, as a unit of measurement of...