Local food system resilience in discourse and community practice: Findings from southern Wisconsin
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This paper examines the discourse and practice of food system resilience through a community-based case study in southern Wisconsin. In response to COVID-19 disruptions, a farm-to-table restaurant collaborated with farmers, community members, and university researchers to launch the Brix Project, supported by USDA Local Food Promotion Program funding. Using community-based research methods and grounded in a political ecology framework, this study analyzes how resilience was defined, operationalized, and politicized by project collaborators. Although the project’s grant framing emphasized market-based economic resilience, community actors envisioned a relational and transformative form of resilience rooted in abundance, flexibility, and stability. The study highlights how grassroots efforts tactically engaged with dominant resilience discourse to access resources, while simultaneously advancing more integrated and politically conscious food system transformation. This work contributes to scholarship on transformative resilience by demonstrating how relational autonomy and community-rooted definitions of resilience can contest and reconfigure conventional food system structures.
Author: Jules Reynolds
Institution: University of Wisconsin–Madison
Language: English
Domain: Life Sciences
SDG: Zero hunger
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $500
Funder: University of Wisconsin-Madison
OpenAlex ID: W4414224787