In a special guest article, Jack Thompson, editor of TABLE’s Fodder newsletter, explores the context in which food’s latest buzzword is being used and why we need to interrogate what it actually means in practice.
If you say a word too many times the brain is unable to connect it to its original meaning – a process known in the psychological field as semantic satiation. You could argue this is what has happened to sustainability.
‘Sustainable meat’, ‘sustainable intensification’, ‘sustainable packaging’, ‘sustainable procurement’. Was it ever clear what sustainable meant? Glossy marketing was often not backed up with action and over time its meaning became diluted; its glow dulled.
But when one food system buzzword fades, another one takes its place. Today is the era of resilience for food businesses who are seeking to show they are good corporate citizens.
Companies are using the term far and wide. Speaking at London Tech Week on June 10th, Tesco’s CEO, Ashwin Prasad, talked about how low-carbon fertilisers could “build resilience”. In Supply Chain magazine, executives from Heinz discussed how data and innovation could “drive resilience,” and in AgFunder News, Nestlé’s head of sustainability, Anita Wälz, spoke about how their regenerative farming pilot would “build a more resilient food system”.
In a time of ongoing crises, it makes sense that resilience has become the watchword. As the climate crisis continues to intensify and the war in the Middle East enters its fourth month – the third major supply chain disruption in six years after Covid-19 and the war in Ukraine – the ability to withstand shocks and ensure constant supply has become ever more pressing and relevant for food companies. It’s a word that fits the time.
As companies seek to reduce their exposure to geopolitical and climate events, the growing use of the term purports to signal a shift of growing alignment between sustainability and commercial interests.
While sustainability has arguably been primarily about obligation via imposed and voluntary targets, and to a lesser degree marketing, resilience signals strength and business survival – an intrinsically easier concept for executives to get on board with. And as the public’s interest in sustainability has waned under the sustained pressure of a cost of living crisis, environmental advocates have sought a strategy to maintain the attention of businesses. Resilience is the term that has joined the dots between economics and the environment.
But the danger is that the word resilience can be used to justify any number of different strategies; a new term but no new action on the ground. Beneath the term, there is an unspoken set of assumptions that underpin how the word is deployed and the food system they envision. For some, it’s about ensuring food supply chains keep running – business as usual. For others, resilience is a pathway to a systemic transformation of the food system.
Sue Pritchard, chief executive of the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission, argued in The Observer that agroforestry, diverse crop rotations and lower farm inputs, can help reduce risk to the spasms of geopolitical tumult all while increasing resilience to extreme weather events. In Pritchard’s vision, a resilient food system means a lower dependence on fossil fuel-based fertilisers to reduce geopolitical and climate risk. But a new system comes with new risks. For example, agroforestry has an increased need for labour in the maintenance of trees and harvests, and economic returns are delayed as trees reach maturity.
At a different end of the spectrum, the National Farmers Union (NFU) has called for the government to subsidise the cost of fertiliser should the price rise above a certain level in its ‘Fertiliser resilience in action’ plan. Resilience here is framed as keeping domestic yields stable and lowering dependence on food imports, while maintaining reliance on chemical inputs.
It’s quite the gap; Pritchard pitches a transition away from synthetic fertiliser to a new model of agriculture and the NFU wants an affordable supply of fertiliser. All under the same banner of resilience. But what are we being resilient with? And what are we being resilient for?
What does resilience mean?
The term carries such range because it’s rooted in three distinct disciplines; engineering, ecology and psychology, each bringing a different definition and application.
A recent study in the IOP Science journal helps us break down its contention and the different applications in food systems. Resilience can be narrowed down to three distinct domains:
Robustness; the ability to withstand a shock and maintain supply.
Recovery; the capacity to return to normal after a disruption.
And Reorientation; the ability for systems to adapt and change in the long term, with the aim of reorienting to a new model with systemic changes.
Using this framework, we can clearly place Pritchard in the reorientation domain, and the NFU in robustness and recovery.
In the study author’s case study of a chicken tikka masala supply chain, actors prioritised robustness, including holding buffer stock and having back-up suppliers; and recovery, like simplifying the product base to increase the range of suppliers available and collaborating with suppliers through having, for example, monthly meetings to discuss potential disruptions. Reorientation received much less attention due to the perceived cost and the lack of predictability of future disruptions.
“‘You could spend half your life – or waste half your life – planning for potential problems that never arrive,” said one importer interviewed for the study.
It also stressed that a focus on maintaining a reliable supply chain – robustness and recovery – can impede a shift to a new normal because companies are focused on getting back to ‘normal’.
Colin Anderson, associate professor at the University of Vermont, warns the dominant approach to resilience prioritises bouncing back to pre-crisis conditions rather than forging a new model of operating.
As the term is applied in an increasingly wide range of contexts with different influences, critics of the term demand four questions are answered to help us understand what people mean when they use the term:
Resilience of what? The soil, the farm business, the supply chain or the system more widely?
Resilience to what? What specific shock; extreme weather, geopolitical turbulence, food safety outbreaks?
Resilience from whose perspective? Is it a farmer, a consumer, or a CEO of a large company?
And finally, resilience for what period of time? Strategies to build resilience in the short term may deplete resilience in the long term.
These questions can help shine a different light on the word resilience. Although the term is framed positively, there is a darker side to it. Destructive, harmful and marginalising supply chains, systems and policies can be very resilient and resistant to change.
Arguably, there are clear advantages to the bagginess of resilience. It’s enabling food companies to have a conversation about reducing emissions and farm inputs and supporting regenerative farming as commercially and operationally central rather than peripheral. Investing in low-carbon fertiliser isn’t just to look good, it’s about reducing risk to geopolitics. This is a conversation we ought to encourage.
Baggy buzzwords
We see a similar bagginess across food system buzzwords; particularly ‘regenerative’. In TABLE’s year-long research with regenerative stakeholders across the supply chain, we found there are definite pros and cons to the ambiguity of the term. On the one hand, the loose definition has made it ripe for corporations to use the word within their marketing without regulation of what it means in practice. On the other hand, the flexibility has made the movement inclusive for farmers and because it’s not tied to specific practices, it can house continuous learning and improvement in a way that a more rigid system cannot.
But a hollow and indiscriminate use of regenerative by companies can leave it increasingly vulnerable to the same semantic satiation that befell sustainability.
The same could be said for food system ‘transformation’, increasingly used in all manner of reports and at events held in glamorous conference halls. It tells us nothing about what specific elements of the system need to be transformed, by whom, how and why – and to what end.
In a time of multiple food system crises, language and specificity are more important than ever. Clarity and precision build trust. We don’t have time to misunderstand each other and decode an onslaught of buzzwords. When someone says “we’re building a more resilient food system”, ask them, for whom and to what? What does it mean in practice? And who is and isn’t included?
This article forms part of TABLE’s series on contested food system terms; how words host conflicting assumptions and are deployed to justify different food system visions and arguments, such as efficiency, demand, regenerative and processed. Click here to subscribe and follow the series.
Further reading
UK food system resilience is undercooked
The UK food system is not resilient to the kind of shocks that will increasingly present themselves over the next decade, according to the author of a seminal report on the subject
The food sector has reached a critical fork in its sustainability journey. Doing ‘less bad’ is no longer a credible strategy for the future
Leave a Reply