The Blue Ridge Parkway Folklife Project was conducted by the American Folklife Center in cooperation with the National Park Service. Ten folklorists from the American Folklife Center conducted fieldwork in August and September 1978, and collected related materials from 1977 to 1981. The materials were collected for use in designing and improving National Park Service interpretive programs along the Blue Ridge Parkway. The collection consists of sound recordings, video recordings, photographs, and field notes, among other materials. The survey examined folklife in and around an area of the Blue Ridge Parkway at the Virginia and North Carolina border. The project documented old-time music, tales, hunting and hunting stories, farming, tobacco cultivation and auctions, vernacular architecture, quilting, foodways (including drying, canning, and baking), religious music and beliefs, as well as dance events featuring square dancing and flatfoot dancing.

The Chicago Ethnic Arts Project survey was conducted in 1977 by the American Folklife Center at the request of the Illinois Arts Council to assess and document the status of living traditions, practices, and expressions in more than twenty cultural communities in Chicago, and was jointly sponsored by both organizations. The collection consists of approximately 344 sound recordings, 14,141 photographs, 269 folders of manuscript materials, including field notes, among other materials collected during the field survey. Documented food-related traditions include citywide restaurants, fishing on Lake Michigan, cultural and religious ceremonies involving meals, as well as a Japanese tea ceremony, among others.

The Rhode Island Folklife Project collection is based on a field survey project of the American Folklife Center, in cooperation with the Rhode Island Heritage Commission, the Rhode Island Council on the Arts, and the Rhode Island Historical Society in 1979. The collection consists of 200 sound recordings, 17,000 photographs, field notes, and other manuscripts and ephemera, which document a wide range of cultural and occupational traditions of African American, French Canadian, Greek, Irish, Jamaican, Polish, Portuguese, Ukrainian, Italian, and Lithuanian communities, among others, including maritime activities, restaurants and food businesses, and ceremonial traditions.

This online presentation features 718 excerpts of sound recordings, 1,256 photographs, and 10 manuscripts from the American Folklife Center's Coal River Folklife Project Collection. The project documented traditional uses of the mountains in the Big Coal River Valley of southern West Virginia, and explored the cultural dimensions of ecological crisis from 1992 to 1999. There are extensive interviews with local residents on the seasonal harvesting of natural resources--ginseng, ramps (wild leeks), berries, nuts, fish, and game--on occupations, including coal mining and lumbering; and on the impact of large scale industries such as logging and mountaintop removal mining on local communities. Cultural and religious community events were a focus of the project, including foodways traditions, community dinners, storytelling, baptisms, and cemetery customs.

The Occupational Folklife Project (OFP) began in 2010 as a multi-year project by the American Folklife Center to document the culture of contemporary workers during an era of economic and social transition. To date, fieldworkers across the country have recorded more than 900 audio and audiovisual oral history interviews with workers in scores of trades, industries, crafts, and professions. OFP collections related to foodways include “Fresh Produce Workers in Arizona,” “Dairy Farm Workers in New York's North Country,” “Recent Immigrant Workers in Iowa's Meatpacking Industry,” "Winery Workers in Virginia," and “Working the Waterfront: New Bedford, Massachusetts,” all of which are available to research through this online presentation.

The Italian Americans in the West Project collection comprises sound recordings, photographs, video, field notes, and other manuscripts and ephemera, as based on American Folklife Center's Italian Americans in the West project. From 1989 through 1991, the aim was to document an array of cultural traditions and practices of Italian Americans in the western United States, exploring ways they have defined their identity as a cultural group in the past and present. Foodways traditions are well featured in this collection, including as part of public and private cultural activities, festivals, and occupations.

Between the mid-1970s and the late-1990s, the American Folklife Center coordinated a series of field surveys across the United States. Many of these projects occurred with the help of partner organizations at the federal or state level, and were intended to generate significant bodies of cultural documentation that could serve multiple purposes. Fieldworkers included AFC staff as well as specialists in various fields that the AFC contracted for the duration of a given project. This interactive Story Map guides visitors across the country from east to west, visiting each online field survey collection.

By Tania M. Ríos Marrero, 2021 Junior Fellow in the Science, Technology and Business Division. This Story Map provides a brief history of the 1942 sugar industry strike in Puerto Rico drawing connections between aspects of land use, food production and social movement at the edges of the industrial and modern era.