Building Community Food Webs

Ken Meter’s book Building Community Food Webs (Island Press, 2021) harvests insights from several decades of work in communities across the US who are grappling with how to create healthier, more localized food systems.

The book begins with an overview showing how the US food system has extracted wealth from rural and urban areas, and then goes on to highlight 8 community efforts in Montana, Hawai’i, Arizona, Indiana, Ohio, Colorado, and Minnesota that have mounted robust community foods initiatives, showing what elements have contributed to each success. Ken's research and writing have been carried out independently, with no institutional support. 

Ken Meter is one of the most experienced food system analysts in the U.S., integrating market analysis, business development, systems thinking, and social concerns. Meter holds 53 years of experience in inner-city and rural community capacity building. His local economic analyses have promoted local food networks in 144 regions in 41 states, 2 provinces, and 4 tribal nations. He developed a $9.85-milllion plan for local food investment for the state of South Carolina, and completed similar studies for New Mexico, New Hampshire, Hawai‘i, Alaska, Mississippi, Indiana, Ohio, and Minnesota. He developed strategic regional food plans for nearly 20 regions across the U.S. Meter consulted with the USDA Agricultural Marketing Service and Colorado State University as one of 14 co-authors of a toolkit for measuring economic impacts of local food development. He is one of 3 co-editors of Sustainable Food System Assessment: Lessons from Global Practice, published by Routledge (UK) in 2019. He is a native Minnesotan.