Rethinking resilience: home gardening, food sharing and everyday resistance

Abstract

Resilience and food self-provisioning (FSP), terms that until recently were deployed primarily in the study of livelihoods in the Global South, are now attracting attention from alternative food scholarship in the Global North. Drawing on a large-scale survey conducted in the Czech Republic, this paper investigates FSP as a social resilienceenhancing set of practices. In addition to the traditional reading of FSP as a passive, defensive, crisis-deflecting form of resilience, this paper puts forward an alternative conceptualization of resilience as a proactive, preventative, future-oriented and transformation-enabling capacity that runs counter to the tenets of neoliberalism.

Post-socialist smallholders: silence, resistance and alternatives

“…Policy makers and some research reports repeatedly characterise smallholders as backward, a relic of the past (see Kwiencinski 1998), bound to disappear unless they are integrated into corporate-led commercial value chains (see Varga, in this issue, for a critique). In reality, smallholders often thrive within informal exchange networks and markets 8 (Jehlička, Daněk, and Vávra 2019;Varga 2019; Şerban 2019a, all this issue), and provide major contributions to food production (Visser, Kurakin, and Nikulin 2019;Thiemann and Spoor 2019, both this issue), sustainability (Jehlička, Daněk, and Vávra 2019, this issue) and social coherence (Jehlička, Daněk, and Vávra 2019;Varga 2019, both this issue)which remains under the radar (Kuns 2017). Household food production and sharing in CEE societies is an example of sustainability-compliant practices 9 that are important in terms of the number of people involved and volumes of food produced, but they are not necessarily a result of environmental awareness or of economic necessity.…”

“…In China, smallholders form the backbone of the agricultural sector. In some CEE countries, such as the Czech Republic, where smallholders' share in agricultural production is substantially smaller, a large share of the population produces its own food (see Jehlička, Daněk and Vávra [2019], this issue, for how extensive informal food provisioning can enhance social resilence). 3…”

Growing Intergenerational Resilience for Indigenous Food Sovereignty through Home Gardening

“…King (2008) suggests that alternative agricultural practices, including community gardens, can benefit from social-ecological systems approaches to build resilient communities and ecosystems. In the Czech Republic, survey data indicate that selfprovisioning of food through home gardens contributes to resilience beyond immediate economic benefits to strengthen social ties through food sharing practices (Jehlička, Daněk, & Vávra, 2018).…”

Grow, share or buy? Understanding the diverse economies of urban gardeners

“…Food is shared without expectations of reciprocation (Jehlička and Daněk, 2017;Smollett, 1989;Zvončeková, 2019). This practice is both based on and fosters social relationships (Jehlička et al, 2019;Zvončeková, 2019). Informal food economies thus offer a multitude of values which surpass their economic utility (Pungas, 2019).…”

“…These practices are both based on and constitutive of social relationships. Food sharing networks, apart from extending the food provisioning options of their members, can thus be seen as contributing to social resilience (Jehlička et al, 2019).…”