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.
On the Table
On The Table is a social media amplified community listening program that is loosely organized, but not led, by community-based grant-making organizations in the United States. The core activity is the encouragement of individual hosts to invite a small group of people (6-12) to a conversation over food. All these conversations take place in any one community on a single day. Social media posts on that day create broad community awareness of the conversations and the topics discussed. Anyone can register to host and who they invite to their table is entirely up to them. Ideally those invited do not know each other well except for their connection to the host. There is no agenda or pre-determined outcome of the conversation except to catalog what was discussed and what actions were suggested to address the concerns of participants. The results of the conversations are summarized and reported back to the community in a formal document.