ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the construction of some of the spatial, imaginative, and functional components of New England’s pastoral memoryscape and considers some of their implications for contemporary neo-agrarian projects of ‘coming in to the foodshed.’ Attempts to come in to the foodshed are inherently in dialogue, and sometimes in tension, with the memoryscapes of particular places, understood as the layers of meaning that have accrued within a physical environment over time. The six-state region of New England in the northeastern United States presents present-day food reformers with a particularly rich, layered, and complex ground on which to attempt the task of rebuilding a regionally scaled foodshed. The two-century history of market-oriented agriculture in New England reflects the fundamental contradictions between farming at a small scale and the logic of markets centrally organised around the search for profitability and the kinds of efficiencies and technologies that can produce it.
