By Matt Petronzio and Michael Hanson for Mashable.

Food connects us, and at the same time helps shape our identity.

That’s the narrative Seattle-based photographer Michael Hanson tries to show in his ongoing series, Feeding 7 Billion. He documents food’s scarcity and abundance, the communities and rituals that surround it, and how it affects our planet.

A hot dog stand in Montgomery, Alabama has served lunch for decades to passing businessmen.

For two months in 2010, Hanson traveled around the United States with his brother and friend in a short school bus that ran on vegetable oil, collecting stories and photos of America’s urban farming and local food movement. He saw the foundations of communities built on local farms. He saw teenage mothers in Detroit spend part of the school day on a working farm. And he witnessed New Orleans’ resilient Versailles community create makeshift backyard farms in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.