IN THIS ISSUE: Food and community wellness

First paragraph: In this open call issue, we offer a salmagundi of papers focusing on how communities are linking local food production to improved health and wellness. Depicting this theme, the cover of our fall 2021 issue features the Farmacy Project, a community health program that buys produces from local farms and makes it available for free to individuals referred by local healthcare professionals. In the cover photo, Karla Berger with the Brandon (Vermont) Community Health Center helps distribute Farmacy Project shares to clinic patients. Grassroots innovations such as these—linking local small farmers to residents in need of fresh food to improve their health—are part of a critical, although limited, civil society response to an American food system. The food choices of U.S. citizens remain largely controlled by powerful private interests in the indus­trial agriculture and allied food processing and distribution industries. Without countervailing public food system planning, policy, and governance (including a rational, nonpolitical farm bill), the American food system will continue to reflect neither the long-term interests of real family farmers nor the public at large. . . .