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COVID Connections: Lessons from Adaptations to COVID‐19 as Strategies for Building Food System Resilience

To identify elements of crisis response that might hold lessons for resilience beyond the current moment, we studied a central North Carolina food system during the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on ethnographic interviews with farmers, employees and volunteers of food access organizations, and local government employees, our work found that connection, networking, innovation, and technology adoption were sources of strength and growth. Lessons: food system actors found that their social connections helped them to exchange information and resources, meet increased food needs among SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) participants and Latina/os immigrants, and combine efforts to adopt technologies and learn from new labor pools. Challenges: while navigating COVID-19, food system actors faced challenges spanning labor, safety, information, government policies, supply shortages, weather, and unreliable information. In addition to lessons and challenges, we offer a series of future research directions that we identified in our study findings. Our study shows that small-scale production and local food organization and government responses are important and dynamic parts of a resilient food system. Regional systems' actors were able to pivot more quickly than large-scale systems and presented a more flexible, locally suitable model that will likely prove adaptive beyond the pandemic.