Unfolding Grounds: Toward a Poetics of Sustainable Food Systems

04.10.2025


Sustainable food systems demand a fundamental rethinking of our relationship to the world—one that involves a radical departure from the dominant logic of extraction, control, and linear growth. They call for the rewriting of power structures, challenging the industrial-agricultural complex and its entanglement with capitalist and colonial legacies. This reconfiguration shifts authority away from centralized, technocratic models toward decentralized, place-based systems rooted in reciprocity and care. It foregrounds the knowledge of Indigenous communities, local growers, and those whose ways of living with the land have long resisted the homogenizing tendencies of globalization.

Rather than aiming for a fixed outcome, sustainability must be understood as an ongoing transformation—a continuous unfolding shaped by feedback, seasonality, and relationship. Food systems are living, evolving networks—always in motion, always adapting. Rupture and radical reconfiguration are often necessary, as surface-level reforms may not be enough to shift paradigms built on control, profit, and separation. In this sense, breakdowns—whether ecological or social—can open space for renewal.




This renewal comes through an ecological logic of destruction and regeneration. Decay is not a failure, but a passage. What breaks down becomes nourishment. Sustainable food systems thrive in cyclical time, where rest, loss, and transformation are necessary and alive much like Chus Martínez describes the ocean in The Ocean as a Space - not as a resource, but as a thinking entity—a space that teaches us to relate differently. The ocean doesn’t operate in straight lines or clear boundaries.

These systems invite us into a state of immersion, permeability, and continuous movement. Boundaries blur—between human and nonhuman, cultivated and wild, self and system. These are not isolated structures but entangled processes shaped by soil, climate, microbes, and culture. To engage with them is to enter into relation, not control.

We are asked to rethink our relationship to uncertainty—not as something to conquer, but as something to be with. Industrial agriculture promised predictability through control: pesticides, automation, efficiency. But the world doesn’t work that way. Resilience comes from adaptability, from the ability to respond in real time, to adjust with the winds and the rains where uncertainty becomes a teacher, not a threat.

Sustainable food systems operate within nested layers, from the microscopic to the planetary. Soil health connects to climate cycles; a community’s growing practices ripple outward into supply chains and migration flows. Each layer builds on the one before—each part influencing and being influenced in return.




Rather than seeking purity or singular solutions, these systems evolve through layering, synthesis, and emergence. They are shaped by multiple voices, histories, and material realities. No single answer defines them; rather, they are constellations of practices and relationships that come together through attention, care, and time. They grow nonlinearly. Growth here is not about scale or speed, but about depth, connection, and resilience. Knowledge grows from the ground up—through touch, experience, and relation.

Ultimately, sustainable food systems are not systems of mastery, but of conversation. Between humans and ecosystems. Between past and future. Between cultures, climates, and species. Rather than imposing a fixed model, they ask for participation. Not dominance—but dialogue.

This is not about returning to some ideal past. It is about living in the present with more humility, creativity, and care. It is about remembering that how we eat is also how we live—with others, with the Earth, and with the unknown.