SAFN is pleased to announce that the 2026 SAFN Student Research Award winner is Patricia Mathu. Mathu is a doctoral candidate in anthropology at Purdue University. Her dissertation focuses on the middle of local food supply chains, like food hubs, warehouses, and distribution and transportation networks. She finds that these people, infrastructures, and networks are key nodes that can make possible, or constrain, the promises of alternative agriculture. Steadfastly interested in better ways to feed people and steward land, her dissertation research focuses on the US Midwest using ethnography and interviews to explore these nodes.
Mathu is well positioned to work with the agriculture of the middle having spent time doing research with local food distributors and working with small scale farmers. She lived and worked on a land project called Zumwalt Acres in northern Illinois. While there, she co-published Playing in the Dirt, a book on queer Midwestern farmers’ experiences, which is available on a sliding scale.
SAFN is excited to support Mathu’s research given her broad training in the anthropology and archaeology of food. Reviewers applauded her efforts to understand what happens when local systems scale up, examining the decisions that people make as they balance questions of labor, land, infrastructure, and investment. Her research will expand anthropological understandings of the process of negotiating demands for agricultural growth alongside local food production.
