Philip Ackerman-Leist, author of the PCI Resilience Guide Rebuilding the Foodshed was interviewed in this article for Mountain Xpress.

From the article:

One of your talks focuses on the idea of “Rebuilding the Foodshed”, can you give us a preview of what that concept entails and how it might involve individuals within their local community?

Essentially, we allowed the status quo in the food industry to snowball–with no real checks and balances–until we found ourselves with fewer farms and farmers, more mega-scale food businesses, little room for the small to mid-scale entrepreneur, less choice as consumers (in some ways), and very few locally-owned processing, storage, and distribution businesses. Essentially, we lost it all by default, and now we’re trying to reclaim and rebuild it through design. That redesigning is tremendously exciting and rewarding, although it’s incredibly complex and rife with complications. Nonetheless, it’s critical work, and I want to offer up the possibility that rebuilding our foodsheds is, in some ways, a new approach to democracy and a recognition not just of the right to food but also the right to choose which foods… The only way to get there is through collective thinking and action–and that “collective ingenuity” I mentioned before.