This article explores the ways in which social media, specifically Twitter, can provide transparency to local and national food systems. Those interested in and invested in food systems should focus more attention on the mundane, but easily dismissed, photos and tweets that populate Twitter, Instagram, and other social media feeds, especially those from chefs, mobile food vendors, and fishermen and women. As evidence, the article includes excerpts from interviews with and observations of chefs, food cart operators, and fishermen and women operating in the state of Rhode Island.

This essay samples situated perspectives on food, history, and landscape in the Mediterranean. Reflecting on moments of ethnographic research made resonant by particular tastes, it considers how sustainable foodscapes on the island of Sardinia, Italy, are rooted in both family relations and property systems. It focuses on household and community production in the Ogliastra, a rural area on the eastern coast of Sardinia. This enables a critical examination of models of ethical consumption, from the perspective of rural producers. Tastes like the delectable roast meat, goat ricotta, and bitter honey that come from the Ogliastra challenge us to think about such places, not as abstract ecological systems, but as living, adapting communities. Such unique flavors are protected today, not by faddish consumers or ethical gastronomes, but by the residents who value the legacy of the Commons and their own deeply social connections to its generative potential.

This article advances the concept of the agroecological “lighthouse” as a civic space for learning and participating in the principles and practices of urban food production. As urbanization threatens to encourage the increased industrialization of agriculture, growing food in cities promises to alleviate this pressure while creating new opportunities for community empowerment and greater access to sustainable, healthy, and affordable food. This kind of transition, I argue, will demand social relations that bridge science, practice, and movement—and that cut in surprising ways across traditional boundaries between university and community. Drawing from a recent experience in an Urban Agroecology shortcourse in Berkeley, California, I illustrate what such relationships might look like, profiling the caretaker of one backyard garden in the Bay Area. This urban grower effuses what James Scott calls metis , moving fluidly across institutional boundaries, experimenting with agroecological innovations, and offering his space as a lighthouse commons for participatory learning. Interestingly, he is not a PhD, but a retired postal worker. With the stakes mounting for progress in food security across the urban-rural divide, the agroecological lighthouse opens up potential for new researcher-farmer partnerships as well as a means for expanding what we consider legitimate knowledge-making communities. Advancing the notion of a “lighthouse extension model,” I challenge the discourse of mainstream cooperative extension, arguing that a more egalitarian food system will likely emerge from participation by those traditionally excluded from shaping it.