The importance of agriculture is difficult to overstate. Yet the ways that food packaging imagery asserts wholesomeness or that billboards for new residential subdivisions extoll the values of the countryside suggest some of the complications of cultural imagination of where food comes from -- especially in contrast to the everday exposure most of us have to agriculture itself.

I am interested in the intersection of landscape creation and agricultural systems activism. My interest in the possibilities of integrating food production into everyday life, combined with my interest in ongoing contests over management of the cultural landscape, has motivated me to study places where food is produced in more accessible relationship with the places where that food is eaten.

Local food production and food security initiatives, urban and community agriculture, backyard, balcony, and rooftop gardens -- all of these are ways to bring the benefits of fresh food into everyday life. They are also potentially -- if not habitually -- venues for addressing social and environmental issues with which many people are concerned, and yet in the face of which, they feel disempowered.

Photos: Mariestad, cathedral and grain elevator, Kirsten Valentine Cadieux