Also in Food & Health

Renewing America's Food Traditions

Saving and Savoring the Continent's Most Endangered Foods

Edited by Gary Nabhan

Foreword by Deborah Madison

The RAFT Founding Partners

American Livestock Breeds Conservancy (www.albc-usa.org)
The ALBC was founded in 1977 and is headquartered in Pittsboro, North Carolina. The ALBC is dedicated to the conservation and promotion of endangered breeds of livestock and poultry. The conservancy monitors breed populations of ten traditional livestock species in the United States, identifies endangered breeds, documents breed performance, and promotes their use. The ALBC is the preeminent U.S. source for information on domestic animal genetic conservation and has long recognized that small-scale sustainable agriculture systems provide the ideal means to conserve many breeds that are regionally adapted and that have been selected for self-sufficiency.

Center for Sustainable Environments (home.nau.edu/environment)
The Center for Sustainable Environments (CSE) was established at Northern Arizona University (NAU) to serve as an umbrella organization for interdisciplinary environmental collaborations and community outreach in the culturally diverse Intermountain West. In particular, the CSE promotes the linkages between biodiversity and agricultural conservation, especially working to retain traditional ecological knowledge associated with place-based cultures. The center has hosted the Canyon Country Fresh Network of farmers, ranchers, and chefs in the Grand Canyon region and has facilitated the Northern Arizona Food and Agriculture Council. It has a successful track record of working with several tribes on the renewal of their food systems; for example, the CSE facilitated the largest seed repatriation in history to benefit the Hopi tribe and spearheaded the effort to form a Slow Food Presidium for Navajo-Churro sheep among Diné sheepherders. Dr. Gary Nabhan, the center’s outgoing director, is also the founder and facilitator of the RAFT project.

Chefs Collaborative (www.chefscollaborative.org)
The Chefs Collaborative is a national network of more than 1,000 members of the food community who promote sustainable cuisine by celebrating the joys of local, seasonal, and artisanal cooking. Since 1993, the collaborative has held successful tastings and briefings on a variety of issues, including sustainable seafood solutions; grassfed, free-range meat production; GMOs; and animal welfare and safety. The collaborative provides its members with the tools to run both economically and environmentally sustainable food-service businesses.

Cultural Conservancy (www.nativeland.org)
This Native American nonprofit organization is dedicated to the preservation and revitalization of indigenous cultures and their ancestral lands, storytelling, and harvesting traditions. The Cultural Conservancy’s Storyscape media project focuses on the protection of storehouses of traditional knowledge surrounding nutrition, resource use, farming, foraging, and time-tested sustainable land management practices. The conservancy strives to preserve and renew this endangered knowledge through ethnographic recordings and by providing technical assistance for tribes to protect their own cultural legacies.

Native Seeds/SEARCH (www.nativeseeds.org)
Native Seeds/SEARCH is a nonprofit conservation organization based in Tucson, Arizona. NS/S works to conserve, distribute, and document the adapted and diverse varieties of agricultural seed, their wild relatives, and the role these seeds play in cultures of the American Southwest and northwest Mexico. Founded in 1983, NS/S now safeguards 2,000 varieties of desert-adapted agricultural crops. In addition, NS/S promotes the use of these ancient crops and their wild relatives by distributing seeds to traditional communities and to gardeners worldwide. Some 350 varieties grown at the NS/S Conservation Farm in Patagonia, Arizona, are currently available.

Seed Savers Exchange (www.seedsavers.org)
The Seed Savers Exchange, founded in 1975 by Kent and Diane Whealy, is the single most effective food-crop conservation nonprofit in history. The SSE’s Heritage Farm in Decorah, Iowa, permanently maintains and displays 24,000 heirloom vegetable varieties, 700 pre-1900 apples, 200 hardy grapes, and herds of extremely rare Ancient White Park cattle. Since 1981, the SSE’s Garden Seed Inventory (now in its sixth edition) and similar publications have tracked the availability of all nonhybrid vegetables, fruits, nuts, and berries in the United States. Through its yearbook, the SSE annually offers its members network access to 12,000 varieties of heirloom vegetables—almost twice as many nonhybrid varieties as are offered by the entire U.S. mail-order garden seed industry. The Seed Savers Exchange and Heritage Farm have provided the models for organizations and projects in more than thirty countries.

Slow Food USA (www.slowfoodusa.org)
Slow Food USA is a nonprofit organization that supports a biodiverse, sustainable food supply; local producers; and heritage foodways. Founded in 1986 in Italy to protect the pleasures of the table from the homogenization of modern fast food and fast life, Slow Food has grown to encompass a worldwide membership of 80,000 members in one hundred countries. With 170 convivia (chapters) emerging in the United States since 2000, Slow Food USA organizes projects including the Ark of Taste and Presidia, which identify and revitalize foods, farmers, and traditions that are at risk of extinction; Slow Food in Schools, which establishes garden-to-table projects that cultivate the senses and teach an ecological approach to food; and Slow Food Nation, a networking conference of 50,000 food producers, activists, and chefs from all fifty states.