A source-cited research commons on the North American food system — what is grown, moved, eaten, wasted, and paid for; what is breaking; where the leverage is; and what the future of food looks like on the current climate trajectory. Search, save, highlight, collect or synthesize. Frequently updated as the corpus grows.
If you're new to the site, pick a path that fits closest to your interests or goals.
One average person, one year: 894,089 calories, 1.92 acres of cropland, 94,270 gallons of water, 11,113 kWh of energy, 1,819 kg CO₂e. Every figure traceable to a primary source — and scalable from a family to a metropolis.
Open the numbers229 verified sources across production, supply chains, policy, equity, and bioregions — 70% peer-reviewed or primary federal data. Filter by domain, grade, geography, and topic; save and cite as you go.
Search the registryCollect sources into a named collection, highlight what matters, then have the site analyse the set — patterns, grade mix, coverage, and gaps — and prepare it as a citable PDF for your board or your funder.
Start collectingThe corpus documents its own blind spots: pesticide data stale since 2012, food-system energy figures frozen at 2012, foundation grantee outputs that could not be located. For funders, each gap is a candidate for support.
See the gapsA synthesis of what the 229 sources say when read together: the beef lever, the missing middle, the consolidation ratchet, the COVID stress test, and what the climate trajectory does to all of it.
Read the synthesisThe corpus grows by search — and by contribution. Grant-making entities and grantees can submit reports for verification and inclusion; every accepted source is graded on the public rubric.
Submit a reportThe registry is organised as three annotated bibliographies. Read them cover-to-cover in the Library, or slice across them in Sources.
Farms and farmland, consolidation, tenure and heirs' property, seeds and fertilizer and pesticides, irrigation, and the environmental ledger — greenhouse gases, water quality, soil, biodiversity.
Processing and aggregation, distribution, retail and foodservice, diets and nutrition, waste and loss, the Farm Bill and municipal food policy, labor, race and land, SNAP/WIC, and health outcomes.
Ecoregional baselines, rural and urban food systems, tribal food sovereignty — and the documented record: thirteen successes, eighteen failures and supply-chain shocks, each with named causes.