Category Archives: Websites

Southern Foodways Alliance

sfaThe Southern Foodways Alliance documents, studies, and celebrates the diverse food cultures of the changing American South. We set a common table where black and white, rich and poor — all who gather — may consider our history and our future in a spirit of reconciliation.

A member-supported non-profit, based at the University of Mississippi, we stage symposia on food culture, produce documentary films, collect oral histories, and publish compendiums of great writing.  In the Atlantic Monthly, Corby Kummer dubbed the SFA “this country’s most intellectually engaged (and probably most engaging) food society.”

Heritage Toolkit

The cultural traditions and heritage of every community can be an engine for driving economic development if they are preserved and shared with others.  The FARM2U Collaborative® has developed a toolkit with five (5) easy-to-use guides that enable communities to identify their cultural assets and use them tobuild relationships with tourists that can be sustained for years to come.

The Toolkit focuses on heritage tourism, both cultural and culinary.  Once your community decides what makes your “homeplace” attractive to tourists, you can create an authentic experience that will be rewarding for the visitor and community alike.

Cooking in Early Virginia Indian Society

Early Virginia Indians hunted, fished, and collected wild grains and berries, which they prepared in various ways. Meats were roasted, while grains and tubers were pounded into ashcakes and then baked.

For many millennia, boiling water was difficult, but by the Late Woodland Period (AD 900–1600), technology had improved among the Powhatan Indians of Virginia such that a large ceramic stew pot became the focus of family eating.Roasted meats, shellfish, and wild berries were all added to the stew, which boiled throughout the day.

Read more from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities “Encyclopedia Virginia” –>

Saving our Seeds

Saving our Seeds is an educational website devoted to promoting sustainable, ecological, and organic vegetable seed production in the Mid-Atlantic (especially Virginia) and the South. Saving our Seeds offers free publications on seed saving, and other information and resources for gardeners, farmers, seed savers, and seed growers.

Growing A Revolution: America’s Founding Gardeners

Growing A Revolution: America’s Founding Gardeners
The founding fathers won a war, established a government and birthed a nation. And through it all, they never forgot to water the plants. Monticello garden director Peter Hatch and historian Andrea Wulf discuss how Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Madison helped create the uniquely American garden. On NPR’s Science Friday program (July 1, 2011)

Southern Exposure Seed Exchange

Southern Exposure Seed Exchange is located in central Virginia and serves gardeners throughout the U.S. and Canada with heirloom varieties of seed and bulbs grown locally and drawn from a nationwide network of organic seeds.

Renewing America’s Food Traditions (RAFT)

RAFT is an alliance of seven organizations working to preserve America’s endangered foods. They have created several wonderful models for collecting and sharing information on local food heritage, such as:

  • Holding regional workshops to assess the status of food traditions in each of the food nations identified by RAFT
  • Creating and publishing lists of endangered foods
  • Publishing a book highlighting endangered foods, recipes, and stories about those food traditions