Complex vs Complicated: Rethinking Food Security

Food security isn’t a problem to be solved. It’s a system to be cultivated — one tiny part at a time.

Growing, eating well, and being healthy is an infinitely complex problem that can only ever be lived out, never solved. But maybe it can be broken down into very small steps, in each of our communities.

The South African Human Rights Commission recently called for an inquiry into food security, and I’ve been mulling over what we, as the Heart & Soil Agroecology Hub and as food scholars, could usefully submit. One framing kept surfacing.

Complicated problems have answers. Complex ones don’t.

A complicated problem is one that ultimately has an answer. How to build an aeroplane: difficult, but knowable. A complex problem has too many variables to ever be knowable — a marriage, for instance, will never be “solved.”

Food in our country — from agriculture to the way food behaves in our bodies — is treated as a complicated problem rather than a complex one. Something to be solved in a long series of steps, or a unified top-down policy. Yet each step creates a set of infinite variables that ripple out.

Here’s a small example from our own season. Our tomato harvest was poor — but breaking the challenge down gave me a healthy set of options: plant a second crop, can passata in smaller batches, and let other veg take passata’s place where needed (we’re preserving more pesto). The problem didn’t get “solved.” It got lived through.

Living it out, one small part at a time

In the living-out of complex problems, there are key points of leverage. If food security is seen as one grand problem to be solved, progress feels impossible. If we break it into tiny parts, it begins to untangle. Rather than food security for millions of people — what brings one dignified job, or one set of healthy meals?

If those tiny parts overlap with points of leverage, we gain momentum. Maybe there are a million small actions, in a million places, that help us progress: one job created, one spinach grown for a neighbour, one small food-sharing project at a time.

Meeting policy from the ground up

I don’t mean there shouldn’t be good national policy. But we don’t have to wait for it to be discovered, because perhaps it is primarily lived out. We can meet our policymakers from the ground up, as they descend with policy from above. Every day we can grow good food, share good things to eat, and explore how that nourishment translates into being healthy and happy — and share those habits with our community. Perhaps those tiny steps can eventually be mirrored in policy.

This same distinction shaped what we said at the Food Inquiry hearings, and why we think growing for subsistence first is more resilient than growing for market first.

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