Farm-to-table
Farm-to-table (or farm-to-fork, and in some cases farm-to-school) is a social movement which promotes serving local food at restaurants and school cafeterias, preferably through direct acquisition from the producer (which might be a winery, brewery, ranch, fishery, or other type of food producer which is not strictly a "farm"). This might be accomplished by a direct sales relationship, a community-supported agriculture arrangement, a farmer's market, a local distributor or by the restaurant or school raising its own food. Farm-to-table often incorporates a form of food traceability (celebrated as "knowing where your food comes from") where the origin of the food is identified to consumers. Often restaurants cannot source all the food they need for dishes locally, so only some dishes or only some ingredients are labelled as local.
The Food Project
One of the main tenets of The Food Project is that the land that the program uses is a part of the community and therefore must be integrated. One of the innovative ways in which this is accomplished is through community-supported agriculture (CSA), an agricultural model founded in Japan (teikei) and implemented in the U.S. by Indian Line Farm, in Massachusetts. In this model, local consumers buy a share of the farm's harvest. Produce from the harvest is then distributed at the farm to shareholders up to a defined limit. Selection and volume depends on the time of year, but freshness is frequently unmatched by standard retail vendors because the food can be consumed immediately after harvesting.