Potential, precarity and persistence: What British Columbia’s Food Hub Network tells us about resilient food systems

Abstract

Food systems are increasingly complex and face threats from interconnected shocks with cascading effects. There is a need for strategies that increase food system resilience, including food hubs—a type of alternative food network that aims to enhance food system resilience through closer connections between producers and consumers. However, there is a knowledge gap between theory and practice related to the impact of alternative food networks that necessitates further study. In the Canadian province of British Columbia (BC), the emergence of the BC Food Hub Network and its atypical definition of food hubs provided a natural experiment through which to explore the roles food hubs play within regional food systems and their relationships to greater food system resilience. This paper explores how food hubs emerge with both potential and precarity, unpack­ing the role their aspirational potential plays in food system resilience, how the precarity of the hubs themselves can stand in the way of their success, and how their persistence is itself an expression of resilience. Our findings reveal that the role of food hubs in resilient food systems is partial, precarious, and contingent. Food hubs are not yet powerful actors within the market system, but they persist and hold aspirational potential. There is an irony inherent in this as food hubs emerge to address gaps that result from food systems not being resilient, while the food hubs themselves are not resilient and are highly precarious. This research illustrates the interplay of potential, precarity, and persistence that shapes and embodies the ongoing pursuit of food system resilience.