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1 Introduction: Food Systems Planning at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

In the mid-1990s food systems planning began to take root as an element of the urban planning field. One of the early proponents was University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor of Urban and Regional Planning Jerry Kaufman, who, along with then-visiting Assistant Professor Kami Pothukuchi, conducted the third-ever community food systems plan led by a university, as a project of the program’s required graduate planning workshop. In this chapter, the editors of the final report for the class, entitled Fertile Ground: Planning for the Madison/Dane County Food System (Allan et al. 1997), revisit that project 22 years later and reflect on its implications for urban planning, planning pedagogy, and their professional careers.

The groundwork for the studio was laid by a UW-Madison faculty collaborative grant proposal. In 1996, Kaufman was approached by UW-Madison College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Associate Dean Ken Shapiro to participate in a W.K. Kellogg Foundation grant proposal and subsequent project designed to move consideration of food systems out of the sole purview of rural and agricultural consideration (and areas of study) and into the urban context. Through the grant, Jerry created the Madison Food System Project and as part of that effort, led the workshop class (see Pothukuchi and Glosser (2024) in this volume). These efforts were part of a larger coordinated effort at the UW-Madison to build support for food systems study. In addition to the class, the University also hosted the joint conference of the Agriculture, Food & Human Values Society and the Association for the Study of Food & Society. Combined with the activities of faculty members (mostly in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences), the guest lecturers of the Urban and Regional Planning (URPL) Food System Workshop, and the ongoing efforts of the Madison Food System Project, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the URPL students engaged with Kaufman and Pothukuchi rapidly became participants in this incipient academic food movement.

In the following pages we first provide some background on the Department of Urban and Regional Planning and the role that Planning Workshop played in the curriculum. We discuss the pedagogical method briefly and speak to the roles of the students and faculty as well as the possible outcomes and pitfalls common to such courses. We then briefly describe the report from the class before moving on to our reflections. These are organized by a series of questions each of us answered that asked about our feelings about the course, the food systems content, the importance or lack thereof of such innovation in planning curricula, and the impact that studying food systems and working with Jerry Kaufman had on our careers.

1.1 URPL and the Planning Workshop

The Planning Workshop (also called a studio if the planning department is in a design-oriented college) is a common requirement of urban and regional planning programs across the country. Usually driven by a project serving a local community or government and supervised by one or more faculty members to achieve a low student-teacher ratio, the pedagogical approach approximates a normal planning work process. Students are often frustrated with a lack of problem definition and structure, both of which are to be provided by the class itself. It is not uncommon for professionals to return to their planning programs and reflect on how valuable the workshop formula is, even though they were frustrated by the process as students. The role of the faculty is to assist students in problem definition, topic exploration, research design and development given time and other constraints, as well as the possible development of plan alternatives, policy proposals, and client recommendations. Students assume the role of quasi-professionals working to meet the client’s needs.

The URPL workshop was the capstone class for twenty-two graduate students in Urban and Regional Planning. Taken in their second year, it allowed them to both bring together the skills they had learned in their degree program and develop new skills and knowledge through the project. The workshop lasted for a 15-week academic semester in the spring of 1997. The final report was consolidated and edited by three of the students (the authors of this chapter) the following summer with guidance provided by the faculty, Kami Pothukuchi and Jerry Kaufman, and a graduate teaching assistant.

The direction of planning workshops often hinges upon the client and project. Some are quite traditional in their scope and methods. Others are innovative and explore new planning terrain and associated methods. The Food Systems Planning Workshop was of the latter type, and at the time the entire concept of the food system was foreign to planning as a discipline (though certainly not other academic disciplines such as geography and global development). This workshop had two faculty members who were both relatively new to the food systems concept (while Pothukuchi had taken food systems coursework during her doctoral program she was gaining familiarity with Wisconsin, and Kaufman had deep ties in Wisconsin but was on a steep learning curve about the food system). Both thought the topic was very relevant to planning and important for planners to understand. They were also connected to the larger network of food systems academics and practitioners from around the country, several of whom came to the class for discussion. The workshop was the third of its kind, following a 1977 Knoxville, Tennessee, report, Food Distribution and Consumption in Knoxville: Exploring Food-Related Local Planning Issues (Blakey et al. 1977), and another conducted in Los Angeles in 1993 by UCLA planning students, Seeds of Change: Strategies for Food Security in the Inner City (Ashman et al. 1993). While the Knoxville report was inaccessible at the time, the workshop benefitted from lectures and discussions with one of the UCLA project instructors and, later, one of its student writers (Robert Gottlieb and Andy Fisher, respectively). Importantly, Seeds of Change (Ashman et al. 1993) modeled a critical approach that was premised on the human right to food as a key element to food policy. Collectively, the faculty and precedents helped shape the direction and emphasis of the workshop and final report.

2 Fertile Ground: Planning for the Madison/Dane County Food System

The URPL Food System Planning workshop had four phases: (1) a background research phase including extensive readings on the food system, accompanied by local field trips and guest speakers, (2) team-based research on the local food system, (3) a neighborhood-level study of Madison’s Northside, and (4) compilation of a final report, Fertile Ground: Planning for the Madison/Dane County Food System, from a dozen smaller reports produced by the class. Modeled after Seeds of Change, the 1993 UCLA report, the 1997 URPL report was both descriptive and evaluative (Allan et al. 1997). It applied a community food security approach that was critical of the conventional food system.

Fertile Ground was also designed to inspire action. The report described elements and impacts of the local food system, including food asset mapping and food pricing comparisons. Some of this was quite innovative. The report presented results from focus groups held with adults and young people in the city, who shared their opinions and strategies for surviving on limited food budgets. It raised alternatives for the food system, from new possibilities for a piece of property that was to be sold as surplus by the state (much of the community garden/farming and permaculture was eventually implemented, and included permanently affordable community land trust housing in the project now called Troy Gardens), to increasing community gardening citywide, growing the already successful community supported agriculture (CSA) movement regionally, and developing a local food policy council to coordinate government and private sector actions and policy decisions. Much of this activity, including the development of two local food policy councils (city and county), came to pass in Madison and Dane County (and is described elsewhere in this volume). Like many such class reports, Fertile Ground was ambitious in scope, and at times perhaps suffered from professional and political inexperience: the systems transformations called for would be decades in the making. However, Fertile Ground was well-founded empirically and was well-timed in the national and local food systems zeitgeist.

3 Participant Reflections on Innovation in Workshop Teaching: The Food System as Focus of a Planning Workshop, 20 Years Later

To prepare this chapter, the authors began with some reflection on the workshop class, our careers, and questions that might capture some lessons learned and where we might offer experiential insight. We met in online meetings and by email, and through these communications drafted seven questions to drive our reflections. Individually, we prepared responses to these questions, and then compiled them into one shared narrative. This section uses those questions as organizational structure. The first six questions were focused on the 1997 URPL Food Systems Planning Workshop and its lasting significance. The final question asked a more personal question about lessons we may have learned from working with Jerry Kaufman.

3.1 How Did Your Participation in the URPL Food Systems Planning Workshop Influence You Personally and Professionally?

In the short term, the workshop introduced us to a new subfield with issues and questions we had never even considered as budding professionals. One of us grew up in Southwestern Wisconsin and had seen the effects of the farm crisis first-hand without recognizing what it was about:

I had no idea about how the shifts in business, the growth of processing conglomerates and the changes in ensuing contracts drove all that debt and drove families out of farming and drove the use of toxic inputs in farming. The whole thing was a shock. I was a kid who lived in the middle of all that change without remotely understanding it.

We each felt that the class was important to our experience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as it represented the complexity of planning as it directly connected to peoples’ lives, and did so in new and ever-unfolding ways:

The workshop was the single most interesting and impactful course I’ve ever taken as a student. Prior to my participation in the workshop, I didn’t pause to consider much of anything related to food, let alone that there was such a thing as a ‘food system’. As we began our research, I became hooked on the issue of food and the tangled web of connections in the food system. Here was a system that was central to human existence, but for which little coordinated planning occurred outside of the various components comprising it.

The workshop not only influenced our education, but it changed us as individuals. We thought more carefully and systemically about our food and our foodshed, and became more conscious of our eating habits and food choices. These consumer choices and the active thinking they embody remain with us today. For one of us, studying the food system had a profound professional impact, as food systems became a focus of their work as a faculty member in urban planning. For another, the experience in food and agriculture gained in the workshop assisted in his career as a planner for Dane County, Wisconsin.

3.2 The Food Systems Planning Workshop Was Only the Third of Its Kind Ever Performed: What Was Your Sense of the Buy-In or Acceptance About the Topic from Your Fellow Students? Was There Resistance to Exploring this (at the Time) New Avenue of Planning?

At the outset, we recall there being a fair bit of student ambivalence, and some hostility, to the topic. Studying the food system seemed to be a diversion from more standard issues in land use planning. Many students, however, changed their opinion as the course developed. One thing emphasized by Kaufman and Pothukuchi—and something that is a common refrain of faculty teaching studios and workshops—was that the skills developed in the class were portable and relevant to almost any area of planning in which students were interested. Class elements like clearly defining and understanding the question(s), scoping work and sharing workloads, communicating effectively in teams and to a general audience, and writing, are standard fare for planners. The fact that the class was somewhat interdisciplinary and transferable was helpful, even if students never took a liking to the specific content. At the outset of the course, Kaufman told the class that he had changed his professional focus area numerous times over his career, sometimes developing new content areas for the field (such as professional ethics or alternative dispute resolution). His comment stood out to us then, and still does now. For one of us, this concept has driven their work as a faculty member—to explore new ideas in the field and to push planning in new directions in support of equity. Kaufman and Pothukuchi demonstrated this willingness to explore novel concepts throughout the workshop. Most students acquiesced to the requirements of the work, while some loved it and others disliked it. (The student reaction seems typical for planning workshops generally.)

3.2.1 What Is Your Sense of this Feeling in the Field Now? Has the Level of Interest or Resistance Changed?

The level of interest in the food system has clearly increased since the class in 1997. You can see it in many places, from your local grocery store where organics have become mainstream, to the growth and continued importance of community gardens and the ever-changing market for CSA farms. Now, there are academic journals dedicated to food systems, several American Planning Association Planning Advisory Service reports and policy guides to help shape planning practice, and the topics are regularly covered either in distinct elements of, or across community plans. Even the terminology has infiltrated our planning jargon: few people have not heard of a food desert (even as problematic as that term may be). COVID19 only increased the salience of and interest in food systems planning.

Another thing that has changed with regard to food systems planning is planning itself. Food systems planning courses are now regularly offered in university planning programs in the United States and Canada (Greenstein et al. 2015). A few programs have food systems specializations or concentrations, and increasingly public health and planning are more closely connected, including joint degree programs. This is advancing both fields: public health academics and practitioners have long recognized the importance of quality food and nutrition and are coming to see the implications of spatial considerations on food systems and individuals; planners, for their part, are moving beyond traditional topics like spatial or economic analyses in consideration of public interests to include direct drivers of health such as food and nutrition. The professional organizations for practicing planners (American Planning Association) and planning academics (Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning) now include food systems planning interest groups, which are becoming more formalized in their respective organizations.

At the local, regional, and tribal levels, there is an increase in food-related planning, often focused on agricultural land preservation and economic development. At the end of 2017, the Johns Hopkins University’s Center for a Livable Future verified that there were 341 food policy councils in existence across the U.S. and Canada, with all but three states in the U.S. having at least one (Bassarab et al. 2018). Several cities even have food policy directors as well, some of whom are contributors to this volume.

While food systems planning might not be standard in the discipline, it is clearly recognized as a focus in the field. Overt resistance to discussing food systems as being within the purview of municipal, regional, or state functions is greatly reduced. As adaptation and mitigation of climate change impacts becomes of greater importance in policy and planning efforts, it is reasonable to expect that urban agriculture and agricultural policy overall will become even more centered. The URPL Workshop was ahead of its time—and it is incredible to consider how advanced was the Knoxville study done two decades earlier. The planning profession has caught up, though, and this represents significant growth from 1997.

3.3 Have any of the Recommendations in the Final Report Been Implemented?

Surprisingly, given that the report was not particularly focused on providing (many) specific policy recommendations—as a descriptive and exploratory document—many of the suggestions it made about system transformation and local government involvement have been implemented in some form. Beyond some very specific neighborhood-level suggestions for economic development (some food-related), the report called for more coordination around food initiatives, from community gardening, to food asset mapping, to establishing a food policy council. All of these recommendations have come to pass.

City and county planners have worked on numerous food initiatives, from helping to start a farmers market in South Madison, to developing and implementing a program to promote institutional purchases of local food, to planning for a Madison public market. Madison now has a food policy council (City of Madison Mayor’s Office n.d.) that manages a $50,000 annual grant program and works on issues of food security and access, community gardening, food waste reduction, youth programming, and other topics. None of us has kept track of all the local activities, though one of us works as a planner for Dane County and is familiar with those things mentioned above (see Lipman and Caton Campbell (2024) in this volume for an accounting of 20 years of Madison’s efforts). Even at the time of the report, we described the county as a “hotbed of innovation” with regard to food issues. Many of the alternatives the class detailed suggested the potential for people to have more control of their food system. Many of the activities going on in Madison tend to support this goal, though there continue to be food equity issues in the city. There are many food-related organizations and initiatives in Madison and Dane County, the detailing of which may be worthwhile in a future endeavor; however, that is beyond the scope of this chapter.

One topic the report mentioned was the productive agricultural capacity of the Dane County landscape—something threatened even 20 years ago. The Fertile Ground report cited a Wisconsin State Journal article that identified Dane County as, at that time, losing farmland at the second-fastest rate in the nation. Madison and Dane County have continued to grow—boom, even—and the threat to a regional farm economy is big and real. It’s unclear if the class report helped “generate some of the necessary awareness” of this issue.

3.4 Do You Think that the Workshop and Report Contributed to Helping Establish Food Systems Planning as a Branch of the Broader Planning Discipline?

It seems to us that this is a big ask of a workshop report. Suffice to say, it may have played a part because the class was a part of a larger group effort in the U.S. that was working on food systems at that time. So, our class work and report were swept up in and part of that wave of activity. For several years we tracked the number of countries (a few) and U.S. states (many) that the report was sent to, by mail at the time. The class also coincided with the first conference of the Community Food Security Coalition, an outgrowth of the work of several of the guest speakers of the class, and benefitted from the reputation of the UCLA Seeds of Change report produced a few years earlier. These university-community studies both described food systems and demonstrated how urban research methods could be applied to them. Through their distribution and the auspices of their respective universities, these reports became examples other communities could follow. As this was happening, authors such as Marion Nestle and Michael Pollan were popularizing food politics and food systems through books aimed at a general audience (Nestle 2002; Pollan 2006). The broad effect of these books cannot be overstated, as they brought to the popular discourse concepts such as food systems, food justice, and the complex politics of the regulatory system on food and food production. The URPL Workshop was in the right place at the right time.

Another way the class contributed to the growth of food systems planning was to directly or indirectly seed soon-to-be academics and practitioners who would be familiar with or practice directly what they had learned in the class. This includes two of the authors of this piece. It also helped build the foundation of food systems studies at the Department of Planning and Landscape Architecture (then known as Urban and Regional Planning) at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. There were then two faculty interested, a few graduate teaching assistants, and several graduate students in the masters and doctoral programs who later went on to practice or teach, and continue working with Kaufman and Pothukuchi.

For Jerry and Kami, the research the class conducted and the report it created provided them firsthand research experience, and helped them to discuss and write about food systems in a wide variety of places from a position of knowledge. They had foresight in ways none of the students did, and had connections to professional opportunities from hosting conferences to participating in relevant national conferences. These included the American Planning Association (APA); Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP); Community Food Security Coalition; and Agriculture, Food, and Human Values Society and the Association for the Study of Food and Society (their joint conference was held at the UW-Madison in 1997, at the same time as the URPL Workshop). Kaufman and Pothukuchi generously supported the professional development of all three of the authors of this chapter by hosting our attendance at some of these conferences, where we presented the class findings. Jerry and Kami led efforts with members of APA and ACSP to develop first-ever conference tracks, special journal issues, policy guides, and professional advisory reports on food systems and urban agriculture. Some of these had contributions, or indeed were written by, Wisconsin graduates who had worked with Jerry and Kami, and sometimes were done under their leadership. Anecdotally, while many in the planning profession were unclear about why food systems planning should capture their professional interest, Kaufman’s seniority and deeply respected status in the field provided crucial legitimacy to this new movement.

3.5 What Do You Think About the Studio or Workshop Model for Planning Education, and More Specifically Advancing New Ideas, Like Food Systems Planning, in Studios?

That workshop was the single most memorable class I’ve ever taken.

We feel that this workshop did a great job of advancing a new idea as well as developing a useful set of professional planning skills. Our planning faculty author thinks the studio or workshop model of experiential and applied education is one of the best things planning as a discipline offers students for training. Planning is an applied field, incorporating many hard and soft skills and techniques. It is extremely useful to students as proto-practitioners to experience these dimensions in practice, yet in an academically and intellectually safe way—meaning where they are able to stretch their abilities, even fail sometimes, under the guidance of faculty before they become professionals and are subject to the commensurate liability and responsibility—this is the heart of planning workshops.

The workshop approach provided an opportunity to dig into details, to conduct analysis, and also to learn about the broader topic. It provided a hands-on experience while reinforcing the importance of the interdisciplinary and interpersonal approaches central to planning. In addition to defining questions, scoping work, and presenting findings in written and oral form, it required the students to collaborate, cooperate, and address and resolve conflicts. These skills are all vital to planning practitioners. At the same time, because each of the groups reported the outcomes of their investigations—both findings and recommendations—to the larger group and to a panel of county stakeholders, we never lost sight of the larger picture and practical application of our work.

Again, students often complain about their studio/workshop experiences (we were no different in the URPL Food System workshop). They struggle with the ambiguity of practice-oriented education, the challenge of clearly defining questions, working with clients in politicized environments, incorporating the public, and working on deadlines external to the university. And yet, these classes often end up being favorites after they are over, and they sometimes become transformational to students’ professional lives. Former students often approach our planning faculty author after they’ve had several years in practice and explain how studio was the most beneficial part of their education because it most resembles their daily experience. In as much as planners tackle new challenges for communities and new ideas in practice, the opportunity to explore new topics in the workshop/studio environment seems entirely fitting.

3.5.1 Was It Professionally or Personally Beneficial to Examine Something New? Why?

Exploring a new subject was exciting and taught valuable lessons about designing and conducting a research project.

It was absolutely beneficial to examine something new: it expanded our ideas about what planning could be. Most of the research techniques were simply borrowed from other types of planning. But when it all came together, we had developed knowledge, fairly deep knowledge at that, about an element of society we all took part in and yet was invisible to us prior to the workshop. We learned the power of storytelling in the creation of a political message, and the power of metaphor in explaining complex systems. This was important because we had to learn how to tell the story of a food system to planners to even begin sharing the outcomes of the class. This evidently had impact: one of the authors has left planning and has gone on to be an academic in creative writing! (In a small bit of irony, that faculty member used many of the planning process skills in his role as chair of an English department.)

For at least one of us, the interest in planning was not in serving the status quo, but rather exploring problems for which solutions are not yet evident – problems that take communication, collaboration, and creativity to elicit emergent properties or solutions that may not have been possible before such engagement. As such, taking on a new subfield as a class was both personally and professionally valuable. As mentioned before, Kaufman regularly emphasized the dynamism of planning and the unpredictable turns that a career would likely take; he began our development as nimble practitioners in the practice of the workshop.

3.6 Did Working on Food Systems Shape Your Thinking About Values or Ethics, and If So, How? If Not, Why Not?

All three of us felt that being in the food systems workshop and working on the final report helped shape our sense of ethics and personal responsibility. It framed both personal and more general understandings of our ethical stances, represented by our actions and our thinking. When we took the workshop course, we were young and privileged enough to not have to consider the impacts of our food decisions. We ate highly processed food from the industrial food system without thinking about the social, environmental, or personal health implications of those choices. That all began to change in the workshop, and the insights we started developing then have continued to grow and shape our lives to the present.

I’m not a perfect eater by any means, but I am aware of what my choices mean and the impact my choices have, and clearly exhibit a pattern of choices that support the local foodshed and low input, high nutrient agricultural practices. That metaphor—the foodshed—extends to the way I think about all consumer goods I purchase. I make better ethical choices because I had what I believe was deep training that took root in the workshop.

For the two of us who continue to work in planning, the ethical training we received in the workshop and by studying the food system has carried into our professional planning lives. It helped us develop a greater awareness of ethics in our roles as a planning practitioner and academic. Food is such a universal and yet distinctly cultural element of people’s lives that decisions made about one’s food practices are highly personal and can reflect the way one interacts with the world (something that many religious texts and practices have recognized). Understanding foodways—the socio-cultural practices of provisioning and eating—and seeing how personal and institutional decisions can affect our lives is like the first step of engaging in the democratic practice required of a just and fair, healthy, and joyful society. Food is a gateway for people to engage in community. For the academic among us, the deep ethical work in food systems planning has been a guiding point for continuing in the field.

Without finding food systems planning, I’m not sure I could have stayed in planning because what has become clear in the food system work is that, for example, dismantling racism (something that needs to be done across all aspects of our society) isn’t just a side activity. It is THE activity. All else comes from, and after, equity, justice, sovereignty, whatever you want to call it. If planning isn’t doing this work in all of its subfields (and of course it is not), then it isn’t really doing the ethically necessary work of planning.

Looking at the food system allowed us to see ourselves differently, to contextualize and question our actions in a larger, complex system of which we were an unknowing part. The food system was at first conceptually distant but at the same time universally connected to us, and that unseen connection became a heuristic device for us in explaining food systems planning to others for whom it was also invisible.

Examining the food system provided a tangible way to understand the impacts our choices had, and called into question for us what responsibilities came with those choices. An interesting thing about this finding, and something that might reflect on Jerry’s pedagogical style, which was more Socratic than dogmatic, is that ethics were not an explicit topic in the class. But Jerry and Kami allowed the course material to lead us to the lessons that were almost unavoidable, especially to planners who were ostensibly interested in conceptions of right action. In this regard, a workshop on food systems planning probably provided more opportunity to develop our thinking on ethics than would a more conventional planning studio.

3.7 Did Working with Jerry Provide Any Specific Insights for You?

Jerry was the best mentor and teacher I’ve ever had.

Jerry is a giant in my life.

It is no understatement to say that working with Jerry and taking classes with him transformed each of our lives. He was brimming with enthusiasm, and somehow managed to retain and harness the boundless curiosity and imagination that most of us lose in our childhood. Fortunately for those who came into contact with him, he was eager to share, and help you develop your own curiosity, imagination, and worldview. He rarely gave one the direct answer one would have desired; instead, he gave you what you needed to develop your own thoughts and discoveries.

As much as I learned from him, some of the most valuable lessons and insights had nothing to do with any academic subject and everything to do with life.

Insights we took away from our time with Jerry included the importance of positivity; he was in the words of one of us, an optimistic modernist. Progress was necessary and possible, but patience with process was important. Reflection brought about insight, and this, too, required patience.

Jerry probably was predisposed to have a patient disposition with people, but this may have also come from the benefit of a long career. He loved what he did, and he was always attracted to new things. He may have taken on five or six new and major topics that eventually became significant elements of the planning discipline. His curiosity, mixed with patience and imagination about the future, allowed him to see the possibility in new things. He knew that something was always going to come along to inspire him, and in turn, those around him. In the development of food systems planning, it became clear that many planners didn’t see the importance of this new subdiscipline (though, ironically, they understood the importance of many of the subsystems of the food system!). It was equally clear that experienced (and professionally influential) planners regarded Jerry so highly that they came to believe that there must be something to food systems planning if he were so interested by it. His teamwork with a group of foresightful planners (described in Pothukuchi and Glosser (2024), exemplified creativity, imagination, and patience, along with a commitment to the planning process.

These insights of Jerry’s, or perhaps his characteristic ways of being, provided a model for developing professionals. We could have an optimistic outlook, seek change in new ways, and recognize that change comes slowly. And, with attention to detail and a good deal of work, there were always new and interesting things on which one could spend professional time. Many of his lessons carried over into the rest of our lives; in this we are certainly not unique.

4 Conclusion

Several things are clear to us in retrospect: addressing a new topic in a workshop or studio course environment was professionally helpful and personally developmental. Of particular note with regard to teaching innovative material in a graduate class setting is that food systems became part of mainstream planning. The students in the Fertile Ground class were more prepared for that new development than others who had not been exposed to the material.

We think the development of food systems planning also helps explain why the recommendations in the report were reasonably well implemented. The report similarly helped advance the field of food systems planning through both in its distribution and by the experiential and empirical value it had for the faculty researcher participants.

We are unanimous in our support of the studio course model of education for planning students, as it best approximates the challenges of practice. And, as practice is constantly changing to address new societal concerns, we also felt that addressing an emergent topic through this model was appropriate (even if we were at first quite skeptical). We all agreed that the richness of the study of food systems allowed us to not only develop basic planning skills of data collection and analysis, but also allowed for an examination of our ethical framing as student practitioners. This consideration of ethical behavior has continued throughout our careers and our personal lives. And finally, in related fashion, our experiences with Jerry as one of the instructors (and teacher in other classes, advisor, and mentor) have left a lasting impact on us. We recognize his optimism and enthusiasm, creativity and intellectual nimbleness, and patience with people and the professional discipline. Each of us feels inspired by his example and regard our experience working with him on the workshop and Fertile Ground as a high point of our academic experiences.