Food as Compass in Times of Collapse
A few months ago, a colleague deeply immersed in studying the metacrisis and assessing existential risk asked why I bother with food. In the face of climate tipping points, AI risk, and political fragmentation, shouldn’t food be peripheral? Another colleague, equally confident, told me that food is the one issue we can solve, if only we muster the will. Both perspectives miss what I’ve come to see as the deeper truth: food is neither a side issue nor a straightforward puzzle with clear fixes. It is the most intimate and immediate compass we have for navigating collapse.
For two decades, my work has wound through peace studies, international development, law, and food systems. Those experiences come together in my forthcoming book, Feeding the Future: Restoring the Planet and Healing Ourselves. That book offers a map—a way of seeing how food, health, and ecology are interwoven across our collective crises. Yet as collapse unfolds, I’ve come to see that maps can only take us so far. They assume stable ground and predictable terrain, giving the impression of certainty in a world that is anything but stable.
In times of upheaval, what we need is a compass that offers orientation rather than direction. Food, I believe, can serve that role. It brings us back to the body, to community, and to the living systems that sustain all life. It shows us what we have overlooked, including the costs we’ve displaced, the dependencies we’ve denied, and the choices we face each day. Collapse reveals itself most vividly through food: in our kitchens, our children’s health, our landscapes, and the vitality of our soils and waters.
The essays and reflections I am writing now grow from both frustration and active hope. They arise from the understanding that transformation is possible and from the sober recognition of how difficult it is within systems shaped by consolidation, polarization, and disconnection. Through them, I will explore why food belongs at the heart of how we navigate collapse-aware futures, and how Food as Compass can help us find orientation when familiar frameworks no longer hold.
This compass rests on four directions that offer a way of seeing, acting, and relating in service to regeneration:
North: Life-Centered Provisioning: Reimagining how we meet our needs for nourishment, energy, and shelter in ways that sustain rather than deplete the web of life.
East: Relational Sensemaking: Cultivating the ability to listen across difference, hold paradox, and stay present in uncertainty so that new forms of understanding can emerge.
South: Cultural and Inner Renewal: Nurturing gratitude, imagination, and grief as the ground from which resilience grows, both within us and within our communities.
West: Structural Reorientation: Transforming the systems (policies, markets, and institutions) that shape our lives, so that they serve the flourishing of people, places, and the more-than-human world.
At the center of this compass is regeneration itself, understood as a practice of relationship. It asks us to move through the world with attentiveness, humility, and care. Food as Compass is an invitation to orient by what gives life, to walk together through uncertainty with a steadier sense of direction, and to remember that even in times of unraveling, nourishment is still possible.
