There is growing recognition that the UK needs to build greater food resilience. Tim Lang’s recent work is important here. It makes a compelling case for readiness: shorter supply chains, diversified sources of production, and stronger capacity to withstand shocks. That matters enormously. But readiness on the supply side is only half the story.
Food resilience is a two-sided platform problem.
It is not enough to ensure that food exists, or even that it reaches shops, distribution hubs, or community outlets. We also have to ask whether people can access that food in ways that allow it to become nourishment, care, and everyday security. Just because food is available does not mean it will get to the people who need it. And even if it does, that still does not guarantee it can be stored, cooked, shared, or eaten.
This is where community resilience comes in. As I argue in Building Resilience: The Role of Food Clubs in UK Food Security, food security is not only about what is in the system. It is also about whether people have access to community-based infrastructures that allow food to be obtained, stored, cooked, shared, and eaten in ways that support everyday life. Food clubs are one example of this broader resilience architecture.
In economically wealthy contexts such as the UK, the dominant mechanism through which people access food is through purchase in a market system organised primarily around profit maximisation. For many people, this works well enough most of the time. But it is also a fragile arrangement. It assumes that households have enough money, enough time, enough equipment, enough energy, enough transport, enough storage, and enough practical capacity to turn food into meals. When any of these are disrupted, access breaks down, even when food is technically present in the system.
That is the blind spot in many discussions of food resilience. We talk about supply, but not enough about access. We talk about availability, but not enough about use.
A resilient food system therefore needs more than diversified production. It also needs diversified consumption mechanisms: multiple ways for people to obtain and use food beyond the narrow logics of maximising sales and extracting profit. This may still include purchase, but through models where surplus supports sustainability rather than endless growth. It may also include sharing, gifting, barter, mutual aid, community growing, food clubs, social eating spaces, and other collective infrastructures of access.
Amartya Sen helps us think about this differently. What matters is not only whether food exists as a commodity, but whether people have real opportunities to access it through different means. These could include buying, but also sharing, gifting, own production, barter, or community exchange. I think of these as access channels: the practical routes through which food becomes available in everyday life.
This matters because highly “efficient” systems are often only efficient from the perspective of profit. They may be efficient at moving products, cutting slack, and concentrating market power, while being deeply inefficient for people, place, planet, and even food itself. If food is produced and distributed in ways that cannot be reliably turned into sustenance where it is needed, then the system is not truly resilient.
Building alternative access channels does more than help people at the margins. It strengthens the whole system. When households and communities have multiple ways to access food, they are less exposed to shocks in any single channel. And when non-maximising forms of provision exist alongside profit-driven ones, they also put pressure on the mainstream system to respond differently. They force greater attention to health, wellbeing, justice, and sustainability.
So yes, we need shorter supply chains and diversified production sources and methods. But that is not sufficient. We also need community resilience and diversified access channels. Food resilience is not just about making sure food is there. It is about making sure people can actually get it, use it, and benefit from it.
If we forget that, we risk building a food system that is ready for disruption in theory, but not resilient in practice.
GeoFoodie 