Western Livestock Production and Their Challenge to Thompson’s Food System Archetypes

Food systems are complex and made especially so by the competing values that diverse communities attribute to them and expect from them. The four archetypes of food systems that Paul B. Thompson has conceptualized help to provide clarity to this complexity; however, the food system of livestock production in the American West does not neatly align with any of these. In this chapter, I briefly describe the archetypes and how they each align and misalign with my experiences in this food system. My readers can expect to learn a bit about the history of grazing in the West, federally managed lands, current livestock practices in the West, and how the intertwining of the three create a food system that challenges the four archetypes. Ultimately, I aim to illustrate that Western livestock production systems do not fit neatly into Thompson’s archetypes, leading to either refining the archetypes or the emergence of a fifth archetype that shares features with (but is not reducible to) the others.