This short and highly readable paper argues that “creative imagination” and positive stories about the future are necessary for generating solutions, in contrast to “purely technocratic” approaches, which fail to motivate people. It sketches out three possible scenarios for biodiversity and food production in the year 2050, noting that none are inevitable.

This paper examines how localised the US food system could become by calculating theoretical minimum foodshed sizes (i.e. average distance travelled by food) for 378 urban areas under seven different dietary scenarios. It finds that (on average) foodsheds can be smaller for the low-meat diets compared to high-meat diets.

This report by UK charity the Soil Association argues that COVID-19 has highlighted the fragility of long supply chains, and that supporting shorter supply chains will make the food system more resilient and sustainable. It also gives examples of localised food supply initiatives in the UK.

This book uses case studies from Europe and North America to explore how relocalised food supply chains could respond to challenges to the food system. It argues that shorter food supply chains could in principle perform better socially, economically and environmentally than more geographically dispersed supply chains.

FCRN member Mark Driscoll has written this blog post, which argues that sustainable, healthy diets are key to building back better food systems after the COVID-19 pandemic. Driscoll points to three opportunities for rebuilding resilience in the food system: shorter supply chains and the decentralisation of food production; introducing more diversity of “visions, approaches, actors, crops, and culinary diversity” into the food system; and schemes that give citizens more agency over food systems.

According to this article by Civil Eats, some farmers in the Great Plains of the United States are sowing “chaos gardens” - fields of mixed fruit and vegetable plants such as peas, squash, radish, okra, melons and sweet corn - as cover crops between the soy and corn that are the dominant crops in the area. The produce is harvested by volunteers and donated to food banks or other community groups. 

This book looks at how gentrification affects the urban food landscape in several American cities, and what activists are doing to resist it.

This blog post by Caroline Grunewald of US think tank The Breakthrough Institute argues that a global food system offers greater resilience against local production failures than a local food system, contrary to narratives that the COVID-19 pandemic illustrates the fragile nature of the global food system and that local food systems are more resilient.