Building post-COVID community resilience by moving beyond emergency food support

The need for resilience thinking concerning food access became particularly stark during the COVID-19 pandemic. In March of 2020 rates of COVID infection in England rose to such an extent that the government took the step to put its population into lockdown. People were instructed to work from home and not to socialise with others. Business and community organisations were closed unless they were providing front line or essential services. While food retail remained open throughout the lockdown, food insecurity was both amplified and an effect of the lockdown (Loopstra 2020). While national government and local authorities scrambled to mitigate these effects, it quickly became apparent that if we are to build back better during and after the COVID crisis, a new understanding of food provision and support for those most vulnerable to food insecurity is needed. It also became clear that some localities were more resilient to food insecurity compared to others.

In this chapter, I outline food insecurity and how it manifested itself during the initial lockdown period. I then turn to how local authorities and food providers responded to the crisis and their increasing realisation that a longer-term solution is needed. I propose the Food Ladders framework that mobilises resilience thinking as a way to evaluate food projects at the local scale as well as the food landscapes (foodscapes) they are part of and then build them better. The Food Ladders framework adopts a practice approach to understanding how food using activities enact resilience practice to achieve different outcomes concerning the availability and affordability of food as well as being a means to enable the social connectivity needed to provide mutual aid and support. While many localities are now adopting this framework to provide support within their communities, there remain structural barriers that pose a threat to the ability of these place-based interventions to succeed. The final section highlights some of these threats and suggests areas for further research and intervention to ease the way for local scale resilience to be enacted.