Community Nutrition Resilience in Greater Miami

Feeding Communities in the Face of Climate Change

Franziska Alesso-Bendisch

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9783030274504
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030274511
• Topic: Sciences biologiques
• Subtopic: Science environnementale

 

© The Author(s) 2020

F. Alesso-BendischCommunity Nutrition Resilience in Greater MiamiPalgrave Studies in Climate Resilient Societieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27451-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Prologue: Community Nutrition Resilience—What and Why

Franziska Alesso-Bendisch¹

(1)

Well Life Ventures, Miami Beach, FL, USA

Franziska Alesso-Bendisch

Abstract

This chapter conceptualizes community nutrition resilience. It draws on a literature review related to resilience, delineating the term from the related terms “sustainability,” “transformability,” and “adaptability.” It examines resilience in an urban setting and then among communities. Subsequently, it looks at food security and identifies nutrition as a critical component affecting the health, well-being, and opportunities of communities. It pays particular attention to how a changing climate affects food security. It then examines food systems and its constituent parts as the vehicle for delivering community nutrition resilience. Ultimately, it offers a definition of community nutrition resilience.

Keywords

ResilienceUrban resilienceCommunity resilienceFood securityFood systemCommunity nutrition resilience

End Abstract

Nutritious food is the basis for human growth. Access to nutritious and safe food, most commonly defined as food security, determines in its worst case whether to live or die. Still, in a more moderate scenario, food security determines whether one can fully biologically develop, learn, and create, and benefit from economic opportunity.

When discussing food security, reference is usually made to developing countries and a lack of availability of or access to food. And in fact, around 827 million people worldwide lacked access to adequate foods in 2017 (FAO.org 2018), and about one-third of the global population suffer from deficiencies in essential vitamins and minerals (WHO 2019). However, food insecurity does not only affect developing countries. In the United States of America (USA), about 48 million people (or 15% of the population) live in food insecure households.

While under-nutrition is a serious challenge, millions of more people over-consume foods and beverages that are high in nutrients of concern, such as sugar and fat. In 2016, more than 1.9 billion adults, 18 years and older, were overweight. Of these, over 650 million were obese (WHO.int 2018a). In the USA, over 72 million people (or one in five) are obese, with obesity disproportionately affecting minority and low-income individuals (Kim and von dem Knesebeck 2018). As will be argued in this book, this is because these individuals tend to lack the money, the health literacy and skills, and sometimes even the physical access to the right stores, to be able to choose and prepare healthy foods such as fruits and vegetables.

Poor nutrition affects societies’ ability to thrive. Obesity is one of the leading causes of life-threatening diseases including cardiovascular diseases (mainly heart disease and stroke), musculoskeletal disorders and some cancers (including endometrial, breast, ovarian, prostate, liver, gallbladder, kidney, and colon) (WHO.int 2018a). In addition, poor nutrition affects mental health (Harvard Health Publishing 2015) and has been linked to developmental deficits in children (Korenman et al. 1995). Economically, health costs both for the public and private sector have been soaring worldwide, increasing at a faster pace than the economy of most countries (WHO.int 2018b).

Overweight and obesity, as well as their related noncommunicable diseases, are largely preventable through living a healthy lifestyle that includes regular movement and a diet largely consisting of health-promoting foods such as fruits and vegetables, whole grains, and high-quality protein. Hence for prevention to happen, one must ensure that people are not only food secure in a sense of calorie secure, but nutrition secure as well. Nutrition security includes having physical and economic access to food that is healthy and culturally relevant and being empowered to make healthy food choices as it is often a lack of education that prevents people from choosing nutritious food over nutrient bankrupt alternatives.

Insight about why and how people become nutrition insecure suggests ways of preventing the physical, mental, developmental, and economic impacts of poor nutrition from happening. If interventions are designed in ways that increase nutrition resilience by enhancing people’s ability both to make healthy choices every day and to deal with disturbances, then the need for interventions will diminish. Expanding insights on both is the primary goal of this book.

In a world of growing complexity and uncertainty, the security of food supplies and nutritional value of food is threatened by many factors. On the one hand, multiple processes of global change are happening over time such as urbanization, population aging, and the proliferation of Digital and Artificial Intelligence (AI) can impact the food system. On the other hand, there are unexpected shocks such as natural disasters and financial and political crises, threatening the security of our food supply.

Climate change , or the warming climate, is one of the biggest contributors to both chronic stresses and acute shocks threatening the resilience of food supply and quality. The warming climate affects the food system, from production to consumption and beyond. Further, it exacerbates the negative effects of (food-related) inequalities such as food deserts, to take just one measure of the lack of access to healthy and nutritious food.

For several decades now, resilience has found its way into urban planning and thus into the conversation about the ability of cities to cope with chronic stresses as well as acute shocks, particularly those related to climate change. However, the resilience of food systems—as a sub-system of cities and the vehicle to ensure nutrition security—is often not addressed in urban planning and programming. And that is despite research, for example, by the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City (ICIC), which argues that city leaders should include food systems as part of their resilience planning in order to avoid extended food supply disruptions in the aftermath of any type of upheaval (Whalen and Zeuli 2017). In addition, there’s the systemic challenge of food deserts that needs to be addressed.

Although the investigation of cities and the activities of players in a complex urban system seem useful, looking at resilience on a community level makes sense for various reasons. First, food systems are very particular to neighborhoods and communities. For example, the decision of which type of store to open in a neighborhood, or what products to offer, is often determined by socio-demographic factors such as the income of that particular neighborhood. Second, interventions are oftentimes driven by community centers and on the community level.

Planning for community nutrition resilience, either as part of climate resilience initiatives or as within urban planning, can be simplified by operationalizing concepts of community resilience and nutrition resilience. Hence, this book will focus on nutrition resilience of Greater Miami’s communities, both in the face of chronic stresses and acute shocks, particularly related to climate change.

This chapter will conceptualize the key term of community nutrition resilience. To do that, it will discuss the key concept of resilience—including its distinction from sustainability, adaptability, and transformability—and transfer it to cities and communities. Further, it will delineate nutrition security to ultimately arrive at a definition of community nutrition resilience. It will further look at the resilience of food systems, as a sub-system of community resilience. It will do so by reviewing the relevant literature from a number of related fields to result in a definition and conceptualization of community nutrition resilience that can aid the discussion for academia and practitioners alike.

1.1 Resilience of Social-Ecological Systems

For social-ecological systems, looking at resilience is key to establish their ability to thrive despite chronic stresses and acute shocks. However, many have argued that resilience is in danger of becoming just another buzzword (e.g., Davoudi 2012; Porter and Davoudi 2012; Longstaff et al. 2010) or that it has become an umbrella term, which loosely expresses some of the conceptual underpinnings of the adaptation approach taken (Fünfgeld and McEvoy 2012). For that not to happen, the term needs to be clearly defined and delineated from other terminologies such as sustainability, adaptability, and transformability.

Historically, the concept has evolved significantly. Resilience stems from the Latin word resilire, meaning to spring back, and has its origins in physics, where it is used to describe the stability of materials and their resilience to external shocks (Davoudi 2012). Since the 1960s, resilience has been used in the field of ecology, where multiple meanings of the concept have since emerged, with each being rooted in different world views and scientific traditions (Davoudi 2012). Holling (1973) first made the distinction between so-called engineering resilience and ecological resilience. The distinction of both of these views, with a third view of evolutionary resilience introduced below, is critical to the understanding of resilience in the context of a social system , such as the region Greater Miami, the subject of this book.

Engineering resilience has been defined as the ability to return to an equilibrium or “normal”, steady state after a disturbance (Hol...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Prologue: Community Nutrition Resilience—What and Why
• 2. Resilience Challenges to Community Nutrition Security in Greater Miami
• 3. Taking (Community Nutrition) Resilience Action
• 4. Designing Nutrition Resilient Communities: Learnings from Other Cities
• 5. Conclusions—Making Greater Miami’s Communities Nutrition Resilient
• Back Matter