Local food system resilience in discourse and community practice

Findings from southern Wisconsin

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.