Dios Padre en la constitución de la Trinidad

Writing of storytelling in the food system, Miller and Solin (2015: 672) argue that people develop mental models, by which they mean worldviews that are

‘developed through observation and experience’ as a way of dealing with complexities and shaping transformations in the food system. It is through storytelling, they argue, that people make their mental models of the food system explicit, and thus available to be shared and understood by others (Miller & Solin 2015: 672). No less important, they argue, storytelling also serves as a tool to enable people to adapt or adjust their mental models based on new understandings they gain through being exposed to the perspectives of others (Miller & Solin 2015). Miller and Solin (2015: 675) argue that it is difficult to ‘plan’ a process that will lead to change in the food system because the system is so complex -- and therefore that change is rather realised through ‘stimulating an adaptive response, through which many tiny individual changes compound to bring about large-scale change.

The authors regard storytelling as a social process that builds social capital in the food system, resulting in a collective capacity for adaptive responses from

43 | P a g e

which ‘food system resiliency¹⁰ may emerge’ (Miller & Solin 2015: 676). This approach is based on the idea that everyone has their own particular food narrative to tell, which situates their personal history and experiences within broader cultural narratives of food, and shapes the way they think and act in the food system (Miller & Solin 2015: 672). As people connect their own food experiences, as well as those shared by others, to a widening picture of the food system, the authors argue, they begin to see their own agency

differently, and are able to act in the food system with a clearer sense of purpose (Miller & Solin 2015).

For Miller and Solin (2015) processes of deepening the narratives about where our food comes from, and our relationships to place and ecology, begin to make it possible to envision and enact transformations: ‘we start to see the story narrative deepened from one of simply consuming food to a story that includes our relationship to our community and our community’s relationship to the land and other communities, near and far’ (2015: 675). This happens, they argue, because through story and storytelling, people are better able to understand how to ‘engage in ways that are consistent with their values and intentions’ (2015: 675).

Place is another powerful concept that is relevant to story, with different cultural, political, ecological meanings attached to it, reflected for example in the provenance of certain foods being associated with a particular place (Wiskerke 2009; Lyon 2014; Brown 2015; Masterson et al. 2017). This reflects what Brown refers to as the situated nature of resilience (Brown 2015).

Wiskerke (2009: 370) observes that alternative food geographies have been emerging as a clear ‘countermovement’ to industrial food, with its tendencies towards ‘disconnecting’, ‘disembedding’ and ‘disentwining’ the intricate relationships between people, food and geography. The idea of local food geographies is to reconnect, embed and intertwine food within regional

10 Miller and Solin (2015: 672) define resilience in the context of food systems as ‘(t)he capacity of our food system to adapt to rapid change, to reorganize so that people are well fed without adverse consequences’.

44 | P a g e

cultures, economies, and ecologies, through local networks to connect

different food system actors, localize more of the food economy, promote the uniqueness of local terroir and culture, and create new synergies in how food intersects with related areas such as public health, urban planning and education (Wiskerke 2009: 383). This concept resonates with Brown’s core resilience capacities of rootedness, which is likewise concerned with concepts and place, identity and belonging; and resistance, which deals with the

transformative potential of different value systems, reflected in Wiskerke’s observation that alternative food geographies gain traction not by challenging the industrial food system directly, but rather by enacting an alternative vision of a food system that appeals to people’s values and place attachments (Wiskerke 2009: 383).

While the narrative of ‘placeless’ geography simplifies and obscures all the complex relationships and processes of food, essentially writing the story out of the story -- the alternative narrative is infinitely more complex, creative and rife with possibility -- in that it is a narrative of reclaiming food from being just a placeless commodity, and attempting to restore the stories of food (its provenance, unique regional characteristics and cultural significance and social justice potency) as part of the experience of food and values that people attach to that food (Wiskerke 2009).

Stories provide frames, mental models and cognitive tools for processing complexity and connecting disparate events (Lejano et al. 2013). Expanding on the work of Solin and Miller, a somewhat related idea is expressed in the concept of narrative networks, developed by Lejano, et al. (2013). The authors argue that informal networks often self-organise or coalesce around particular issues (as will be explored with indigenous food, in Chapter 5), as people are attracted to the network through a common story. The authors see narratives as ‘essential in catalysing and sustaining environmental networks, and enabling them to exert influence’ (Ingram et al. 2015: 3). A narrative network is seen as a ‘mutually constitutive group of actors (human and non-human) and ideas’ held together by the ‘glue’ of a shared narrative, or

narratives (Ingram et al. 2015: 4)… ‘By mutually constituting, we mean that a

45 | P a g e

narrative that members of the group voice is what organizes people and gives the group structure; and, it is in the assemblage of actors that we find a

community of narrators that allows the emergence of the narrative’ -- with all of its rich social, political, ecological, economic interconnections (Ingram et al.

2015: 4)

Emplotment is the term used by Lejano et al. (2013) to express the idea that common narratives are both constructed by and shared among members of informal networks concerned with a particular issue such as indigenous food.

The emplotment is the overarching narrative around which the network takes shape (Lejano et al. 2013). The term plurivocity reflects the idea that each individual belonging to a particular narrative-network has their own unique way of expressing the broad narrative that is emplotted in the network (Lejano et al. 2013). This schema supports the view that each person formulates a story according to their own mental models, in complex interaction with broader collective identity constructs (Miller & Solin 2015).

This suggests that storytelling plays a role in activating self-organising processes in complex systems. Goldstein et al. (2012) highlight the potential for 'emergent and plurivocal narratives to unify and direct collective action without explicit planning coordination' (Goldstein et al. 2012). Poli’s idea of

‘learning to dance’ with complex systems (2013: 142) is important, suggesting a different mode of engagement to the problem-solving mindset that tends to dominate in certain institutional, policy and governance settings (Goldstein et al. 2012). The authors argue for narrative to be understood and deployed as a way of engaging diverse communities in defining and building resilience on their own terms and in their own contexts. They see narratives as 'a way to express the subjective and symbolic meaning of resilience... to engage multiple voices and enable self-organising processes to decide what should be made resilient and for whose benefit' (Goldstein et al. 2012: 1285).

The narrative network approach underscores the fact that stories are all around us, whether seen and acknowledged or not, and that inclusive stories and narratives may serve to foster social cohesion (Lejano et al. 2013), as

46 | P a g e

well as ‘enable people to creatively construct their own resilient possibilities' (Goldstein et al. 2012: 1286).