Digest: De-escalating the food fight: trust, language, and the future of food system change

If you ask a room of food system professionals whether they are open-minded, nearly every hand goes up. But when you ask when they last changed their mind about something core to their identity, hands come down. Food futurist Jack Bobo has been running that experiment on audiences for years, and he opened our latest webinar with it, because it exposes the gap between how open we believe we are and how we actually respond when our views are challenged.

That gap has practical consequences. Bobo told the story of a University of Nottingham colleague whose talk to regenerative farmers fell flat. He had urged them to move from intensive to regenerative systems, but the farmers heard him as an academic telling them to stop farming badly and let him show them how to farm well. Had he said instead that farming in the UK is becoming more regenerative, and offered ways to accelerate the transition, the same audience might have leaned in. 

For Bobo, who joined us during London Climate Action Week after a morning spent moderating a panel on the polarisation between livestock and alternative proteins, this is the food system’s hardest problem: trust, and the language we use with one another, decide what change is possible long before the evidence gets heard.

This webinar continued our resilience series, which has moved from the shocks bearing down on the UK food system, through what community-level readiness looks like in practice, to the question underneath all of it: how does change actually happen?

Quick Take

• Polarisation is the threat that makes every other threat harder to solve. The World Economic Forum ranks polarisation fourth among global risks. Bobo argues it belongs first, because problems on the scale of food and agriculture, which use close to 40 per cent of the world’s land and 70 per cent of its fresh water withdrawals, and drive around a third of emissions, cannot be solved without collaboration, and collaboration has never been more difficult.

• The food system operates based on three competing stories, and knowing which one you are telling matters. Bobo’s team at UCLA is mapping organisations onto a triangle of narratives: innovation (science solves problems), sustainability (reduce our impact on the planet), and food sovereignty (the question is who decides). Conflicts between coalitions take predictable forms, with innovation and sustainability arguing over data and metrics while innovation and sovereignty argue over power and governance. Understanding the pattern helps explain why particular fights keep recurring.

• Language sets a ceiling on the size of a coalition. Words that speak only to a corner of the triangle recruit nobody beyond it. Bobo also cautioned against casting villains, which follows the same logic: name an organisation as the villain of your story and you become the villain of theirs, mobilising an opponent that may be larger and better financed than you are.

• Doom and gloom often produces apathy, while hope paired with historical context can produce action. UK carbon emissions per person sound like cause for despair until you learn they are at a 150-year low, down 40 per cent since 1990 while GDP rose 40 per cent. Bobo’s proposed narrative for the food system, that things are good and getting better but not fast enough, invites the people working in it to do better faster rather than blaming them for a system described as broken.

• Reframing the need in terms of resilience speaks to what businesses already fear losing. In a world of geopolitical, climate and supply chain disruption, efficiency has come to equal fragility. Meanwhile, sustainability, Bobo argued, registers with industry as a cost, and costs get cut when times are hard. Resilience, however, sounds like an insurance policy: an investment in your own future.

Deep Dive

Map the stories before you join the fight

The centrepiece of Bobo’s talk was the Narrative Landscape Framework his team is developing at UCLA. It starts from the observation that the food system operates based on three familiar stories. The innovation narrative says that science solves problems, the sustainability narrative centres on reducing our impact on the planet, and the food sovereignty narrative argues that the real question is who decides. Arranged as the corners of a triangle, these become a landscape onto which views can be mapped, making visible which groups sit close to your own worldview and which sit far enough away that conflict is likely.

The lines between the corners predict the type of conflict. Innovation and sustainability coalitions tend to argue over data, metrics and evidence; innovation and sovereignty coalitions argue over power and governance. And the map carries a warning Bobo called the coalition ceiling: the language an organisation uses fixes the number of people who can sign up to its cause. Moving towards the centre of the triangle grows the coalition but can shrink the core, as the most fervent believers feel their views are no longer reflected. There is no right place on the map, he stressed, and some organisations decide to stay at an edge to move the middle. The point of the map is understanding others, and the burden sits with the communicator: if your language limits who you can reach, that is your problem, not your audience’s.

Stories that recruit rather than accuse

Why language carries such weight became clearer through Bobo’s account of outrage. Drawing on Professor Karthik Ramanna’s book The Age of Outrage, he identified three drivers with obvious food system resonance: people feeling their future is threatened, the system is rigged against them, or their identity is under attack. The livestock and alternative protein sectors, he suggested, are locked in exactly this spiral, each triggering all three in the other, and each fluent in the offence given to them while oblivious to the offence they give.

Bobo counseled that casting a villain makes you the villain of the other side’s story and mobilises an opponent who may be better financed than you. Leading with “the food system is unfair” puts everyone who works in it on the defensive while saying it has achieved remarkable things but left too many people behind helps to invite the same audience into problem-solving. Doom narratives, however well evidenced, tend to breed apathy rather than action. His alternative narrative, that things are good and getting better but not fast enough, keeps the urgency while removing the blame.

During the Q&A, Bobo argued for changing the framing, from sustainability to resilience when talking to business. Sustainability registers as a cost, and costs are cut when times get hard. Resilience sounds more like an insurance policy that protects a future the business already cares about. In a world of geopolitical, climate and supply chain disruption, he argued, efficiency has come to equal fragility. One chief sustainability officer’s response to the reframe was simply that he intended to steal it.

What the audience wanted to test

Questions from the community probed the edges of the argument. Can better stories substitute for clarity of purpose, when the most powerful actors in the food system are pursuing profit rather than health or sustainability? How do you engage bad-faith actors without villainising them? Are some political differences simply irreconcilable? 

Bobo’s answer was that genuine impasse is rarer than we assume, and the job is to change behaviour rather than belief. Understanding another coalition’s frame is a precondition for influencing it, not a concession. 

What now?

Bobo’s challenge is uncomfortably practical, because it asks each of us to start with our own views and assumptions. Score your latest report, newsletter or funding bid against the triangle: which coalition does its language recruit, and which does it turn away? One attendee’s reaction in the chat was a wish that they could rewrite their reports and policy briefs on the spot, which suggests how much room there is to work with.

For Root and Reason, the resilience frame sits at the centre of our work, and Bobo’s session offered a reason to think it carries more persuasive weight than we might have assumed. Resilience speaks to interests that businesses, farmers, policymakers and others righth across the food system already recognise as their own. If the coalition for a prepared food system is going to grow, the words used to build it matter.