Exploring resilience capacities with food innovators: a narrative approach

Abstract

Non-technical summary We interviewed grassroots food innovators in South Africa to explore the diverse ways in which their narratives expressed different capacities for resilience, such as dealing with surprise and shaping desirable change. We drew on key resilience themes of rootedness, resourcefulness and resistance (the 3Rs) as lenses through which to view their personal stories and efforts to build resilience and reshape the future. We used narrative and interpretative methods to connect the personal and context-specific experiences of food innovators to the 3Rs, exploring a new approach to uncovering resilience capacities. We suggest that this approach could be usefully employed to understand potential resilience capacities that could help address diverse sustainability challenges around the world.

Proceedings of the Joint International Resilience Conference, JIRC2020

“…Experts with backgrounds in ecology, economics, planning and governance have been engaged in judging the resilience of the Nature Outlooks, through an expert workshop. Our approach is similar to Lindow et al (2020) who interpreted principles as "important features of complex systems that may contribute to the emergence of resilience". Different principles, factors or indicators have been developed to describe how to enhance (or undermine) resilience (e.g.…”

Co‐exploring relational heuristics for sustainability transitions towards more resilient and just Anthropocene futures

“…By experimenting with different approaches for fostering different ways of seeing and hearing each other and ourselves, we allow ourselves to see our own forms of privilege or positions of power in the contexts we inhabit and influence (Galafassi et al, 2018). The many divergent views and values that convene around various sustainability challenges allow opportunities to engage in regenerative conversations that can inform new narratives and relations for plotting ways forward towards creating a shared form of future consciousness and 'world-making' (Lindow et al, 2020).…”

Chefs as change-makers from the kitchen: indigenous knowledge and traditional food as sustainability innovations

“…Some of these initiatives are working specifically to revive knowledge around the access, use and heritage of underutilized and indigenous foods to encourage an ecologically sound and equitable food economy. Chefs are positioned as critical partners in these initiatives – their role being to constitute a reliable market for farmers and fishers, as well as to utilize their position to shift perceptions and consumption habits around underutilized indigenous foods.Kobus van der Merwe, owner and chef at the small restaurant Wolfgat (recently recognized as restaurant of the year by the World Restaurant Awards in February 2019) is pioneering place-specific cuisine drawing on the indigenous foods of the Western Cape with motivations that deeply consider the social histories and ecological aspects of food systems (Lindow, 2017). Another chef in Cape Town described how the “naturally evolved food culture” present in the Western Cape, which he connects to lengthy stewing as a primary method, “needs to be dragged into a more modern, wholesome direction.” He felt food culture was perhaps stunted due to how people have been displaced from the land and that “filling that huge gap by bringing food culture into the present could be a compelling story … but I don't know if that means we lose the cultural element of [the food], or whether that means we're sustaining it because cultural stuff evolves.” This echoes concerns of whether this place-specific cuisine can have an impact outside of the wealthy – often foreign – patrons of high-end restaurants in the Western Cape.…”