INTRODUCTION

The Cache County School District  serves 26 schools across Cache County, Utah. This exhibit is intended to examine the history of the school lunch program in Cache County and assess the current state of the lunch program in 2016. This exhibit is also intended to provide options to improve and change the school lunch system to move toward a healthy, sustainable food system within Cache County Schools. 

WHAT IS A FOODSHED?

The term foodshed first appeared in W.P. Hedden’s 1929 book How Great Cities Are Fed. Hedden metaphorically compares the flow of food to the flow of water in a watershed. Unlike a watershed, though, where physical barriers control the flow of water, Hedden asserted that the barriers that control flows of food in a foodshed are economic in nature. The term was popularized in the 90’s, first in Arthur Getz’s 1991 article “Urban Foodsheds”, and was then further catapulted into the social discourse with the publication of Kloppenburg, Hendrickson, and Stevenson's 1996 article “Coming in to the Foodshed." They define foodshed as the “physical, biological, social, and intellectual components of the multidimensional space in which we live and eat”.

WHAT IS FOODSHED ANALYSIS

Foodshed analysis has become prevalent in social science literature. Foodshed analyses assess the feasibility of increasing the supply of local food in a given area, as well as what the mechanisms for achieving this increase might be. This type of research is typically conducted with the underlying assumption that locally grown food is economically, socially, and environmentally superior to food that is globally grown, and that local food production should be maximized using every possible avenue.

PROJECT CREDITS

• McKenna Walters

• Jackie Sullivan

• Emi Facer

• Matthew Barnett