
By training and experience, Alan Wight is an educator, a sociologist, a permaculturist, a community gardener and sharer of stories. He has learned from artists, researchers, geographers and historians. By personality, he’s an extrovert, a big-picture thinker and a networker. A map of who he’s worked with, learned from and befriended would be a sprawling web across our community of local food.
That network and that habit of thinking collectively are behind the project that he’s been working on now for five years or so that has recently borne fruit.
It’s a book called “Cincinnati’s Foodshed: An Art Atlas”, a compendium of information presented through art: a visualization of the complicated human network by which we get and produce food in the Greater Cincinnati area. It shows connections between people, within sectors of the system, across the past, present and future, highlighting geographic space over time.
The Greater Cincinnati Regional Food Policy Council, of which Wight is a member, is the host of the project.
Anyone who wants to see what’s going on in food locally could dive into that world through the book, which was published in November. It showcases the work of an impressive collective of artists and historians and other knowledgeable local experts and participants. The project has a number of funders, making it possible to print a lavish, coffee table-style book that goes very deeply into its subject. Its overall impression is of how complicated and busy are the comings and goings and exchanges of every kind of edible.
“The book is a celebration of our food history and innovation. Cincinnati has far more impact globally than you’d expect,” said Wight. “We’ve been the origin of innovations from the Porkopolis disassembly line to the business inventions of corporations like Procter and Gamble and Kroger.”
Every subject gets a narrative, a timeline, and a graphic, whether it’s a map or a graph or portraits of food heroes.

One lesson is how much history can tell you about how things are today. There’s an acknowledgement of the peoples who originally lived on Cincinnati’s land and the agricultural practices they transmitted. Also an illustration of the African food diaspora: all those important foods brought and cultivated by enslaved people that are now essential to how we eat.
Today, we eat a long list of foods that depend on the agricultural industry of pollination of crops with bees. It still relies on the simple bee frame, an invention from Oxford, Ohio.
Another global system we are connected to is the coffee industry. A map and graph about the coffee we drink, often roasted locally, is connected to a large global agriculture system. If you’ve never thought about cellulose and the amazing things you can create with it, a graph and timeline will enlighten you.
“The book also leans into the idea of a regional terroir,” said Wight. Like wine that showcases the characteristics of where it was grown, its terroir, can Cincinnati define its own unique food flavors and personality?
Every size of enterprise that contributes to that Cincinnati uniqueness is included, from Kroger down to a graphic on the laws governing backyard chicken raising, a map of Aiken High School’s farm, a tribute to the Cincinnati enterprises like Frank’s and Perkins.
Some pages show what might have been: a plan for a Hamilton County consolidated market for local farmers that was never built, or the never-finished subway that could have created a very different city.

The Atlas also speculates on what still could be and illustrates the work being done to make a different possible future: The possible future direction of our craft beef industry, for instance, or a diagram of the work that the Greater Cincinnati Local Food Policy council does. “It’s about dreaming for a utopian future,” said Wight.
Wight himself has contributed energy to many of those future-oriented efforts. He learned market gardening and community-scale farming Gorman Heritage Farm, he has a position at the University of Cincinnati as their School and Community Forest Garden Liaison, teaches Fruit and Nut Production at Cincinnati State Technical and Community College, as well as his main teaching position at The Christ College of Nursing and Health Sciences.
The first print run of the Atlas has sold out, but more have been ordered and you can reserve your copy for $80 at https://www.cincinnatifoodatlas.com.