The Landcestor Project is part of an ongoing effort by Cathy Stanton and colleagues to bring public history, museums, and historic sites into closer and more active dialogue with the contemporary “food movement.”  Beginning in Summer 2014 with a pilot version in Wendell, Massachusetts, the Landcestor Project will suggest ways of cultivating greater historical depth in thinking about food and farm policy and politics.  The Summer 2015 project Farm Values: Civic Agriculture at the Crossroads, expanded these ideas into a six-town area in collaboration with Mount Grace Land Conservation Trust. We believe that a more informed, critical, and nuanced sense of the agricultural past, rooted in specific local and regional places, can help strengthen civic dialogue around this important entry-point to thinking about issues of economy, labor, energy, equity, health, and environment.

• Why Wendell?
• Watch for an upcoming book on this topic by Michelle Moon and Cathy Stanton, currently under contract with Routledge and entitled The Missing Ingredient: How History Can Help Reinvent the Food System.
• The History at the Table blog contains more of the rationale for this project, along with some links to similar projects at historic sites.
• Cathy Stanton’s 2012 Ethnographic Landscape Study for Martin Van Buren National Historic Site, “Plant Yourself in My Neighborhood,” also sets out a rationale and model for linking historical interpretation and food activism more closely.