Anthropological Quarterly

ABSTRACT:

What is local food? What makes food—the cultivation, production, distribution, and consumption of agricultural products in particular—so resolutely bound up with place? Place is never simply about social membership—it can also be endowed with a sense of historical depth, and a set of particular possibilities. Active engagement with place is always full of potential that transcends the mere condition of being located in a position. In this essay I bring attention to these potentials drawing on field research in more-than-human places, by considering living and working landscapes laden with concerns for cattle in communities across central North Carolina.