New book features AERO and Mission Mountain Food Enterprise Center

April 30, 2021

Ken Meter’s new book “Building Community Food Webs”, outlines the path to building equitable and inclusive food systems, using case studies from Ken’s work advancing community food system initiatives across the USA.

Montana’s leadership role is featured, including the birth of the Mission Mountain Food Enterprise Center. The stories highlight the value and lasting impact of AERO’s commitment to grassroots community programming where future food system leaders and inspired community models flourish.

Here’s what Island Press says: 

“Building Community Food Webs is the single best place to find both inspiration and pragmatic suggestions for your community foods work. It offers in-depth stories covering some of the most creative and resilient community foods initiatives across the U.S., and also features a groundbreaking and concise economic analysis of the extractive rural economy that has made this community foods movement so necessary.”

Building Community Food Webs offers key insights from Ken Meter’s career advancing community foods initiatives, including:

1. Economic overview showing how the US food system has extracted $4 trillion from the farm sector — leaving farms with a combined worth of $3 trillion.
2. Eight inspiring stories about innovative community foods work in Montana; Hawai‘i; Tucson; Northeast Indiana; Southeast Ohio; Phoenix; Brighton, Colorado; and Dakota County, Minnesota.
3. Key insights that drive this work forward.

Available now from Island Press or Amazon.

AERO INVITE: When you purchase from Amazon Smiles  and select AERO as the organization you want to support, it’s a win-win-win!

For those of you who don’t yet know Ken, here’s his bio:

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 50 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, two 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 author of Building Community Food Webs, published by Island Press in 2021. He is one of 3 co-editors of Sustainable Food System Assessment: Lessons from Global Practice, published by Routledge (UK) in 2019. Meter is also a member of the International Economic Development Council, where he presented at several annual meetings. He has taught at the Harvard Kennedy School and the University of Minnesota.