Food Security in the Era of COVID‐19: Wild Food Provisioning as Resilience During a Global Pandemic

Abstract

The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS‐COV‐2) that causes COVID‐19 has had a devastating impact on human populations, infrastructure, and economies. The structures and systems that supply people with their basic needs have been stressed by the necessary changes COVID‐19 has rendered in everyday life. Here I explore the potential role of wild food provisioning in mitigating the acute impacts of COVID on food supply and its impacts more broadly on modern foodways. Wild food provisioning is a waning practice among human populations in the Global North, but recent research has shown that there are significant amounts of food produced and harvested on the landscape that go unaccounted for in food systems research. Building on this work, I theorize a framework for thinking about food systems that are inclusive of wild food provisioning practices and how said framework might increase the ability of human populations to withstand extreme disturbances such as a global pandemic.

Wild and backyard food use during COVID-19 in upstate New York, United States

“…Taken, together, these findings are consistent with prior research identifying food access and cost savings as motivators for COVID gardening across the Global North (20), and provides novel evidence that pandemic-era motivations for poultry-raising, foraging, fishing, and hunting were similar. It is also consistent with recent literature theorizing more broadly about the potential role for wild food provisioning as a support for food security worldwide during crises such as COVID-19 (66,67), and the role of local knowledge and practices as a buffer and cultural strength recently advocated in human ecology literature (68).…”

Understanding constraints to adaptation using a community-centred toolkit

“…Despite intentions to balance community well-being with conservation, community-based approaches to conservation have sometimes infringed upon both people's self-determination and adaptive capacity [12][13][14][15][16]. Since the 1870s, the dominant discourse within international conservation has been 'fortress conservation'-a top-down form of sustainability policy barring local communities from accessing resources in protected spaces [17][18][19].…”