Why I Started Resilient Foodways

When COVID shutdowns first started in 2020, I vividly remember walking through the store aisles and seeing empty shelves. I quickly had 2 thoughts:

1. I'm in North Carolina, surrounded by great southern farms. I know there's food all around me. How in the world can stores 20 minutes away from the farms be empty?
2. Our food supply chain is way too complicated if a shock like this is enough to cause this ridiculous predicament.

Neither of these thoughts were original. However, they became much more concrete for me in that moment, and they stuck with me long after the stores had restocked.

The first thought is easy enough to explain - giant faceless corporations take shortcuts to cut costs - shortcuts that your local farmer won't take. If consumers only care about price, the cheapest supplier is unlikely to be local.

The second thought is tricky, because it's the result of something that business-minded people think of as a good thing - optimization. Optimization is seen as a direct path to higher profits, and if it's defined simply as 'designing a system to get the most out of a specific scenario', then it follows that when your scenario changes (ex: a global pandemic), the system you've designed will no longer be a good one for that new scenario. The more you've optimized, and the more complicated your system, the less likely it is to adapt to a new scenario well.

In this case, optimization is especially bad because food should be about more than money and efficiency. Did your grandma 'optimize' her homecooked recipes? Did she streamline her processes and go cheap on ingredients? Or... did she simply cook with love, to nourish her grandchildren, without much worry about whether she could make it 5% faster or 8% cheaper? How would you view her home cooked meals if she used words like 'optimization' when she talked about her food prep?

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Inspired, my wife and I started trying to buy local - but we quickly learned that we aren't really the target demographic of most local food offerings. Allow me to broadly divide shoppers into 3 groups, 1 of which doesn't seem to really exist:

1. Group 1 shoppers have time. Time on the weekend to browse a farmer's market for cool finds that could lead to an interesting recipe. Time to travel around to farms and pickup food orders, 2-3 ingredients at a time. Time during the week to experiment with new recipes based on the cool ingredients they found.
2. Group 2 shoppers don't have time. We are in group 2. We have 3 kids and we do optimize our food habits. Between work, school, and other things, food is something we need to prep efficiently. Our shopping happens in a tight 2 hour window on Saturday in between birthday parties, homework, and soccer games. A trip to a farmer's market is not really feasible if we aren't even sure what products are in season.
3. Group 3 shoppers, perhaps like our ancestors, are busy but are much more in tune with seasonal foods, and can have it both ways - juggle varying recipes based on in-season availability, and do it efficiently in short time. I am not sure if people like this exist in the 21st century - year-round produce in every grocery store has spoiled us, and the skill to adapt effortlessly to seasonal produce is probably a highly-localized skill that won't transfer to other geographies.

So we found ourselves in Group 2, realizing that local food is just way more accessible to people in Group 1. I asked myself - what could help? For one, knowing in advance exactly what's available at the farmer's market might encourage us to make the trip. If we already know we need 2 lbs of beef, bread, and milk no matter what, we are much more likely to go, knowing the trip will be worth it.

Some farmers keep strong inventory systems and keep that info public on their website, but others don't, and I don't blame them. They have specific skills (like anyone else), and perform an important service as stewards of our land. They should be outside, not fiddling with apps.

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This, along with my belief that technology is best when it's invisible, lead to the creation of Resilient Foodways, and its first product The Farmer's Assistant. It's a full AI service and the only interface is text messaging. Learn more about the Farmer's Assistant here.

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