Post date 16 Feb 2026 (original LinkedIn date)
Original LinkedIn version· 1,591 words
... from the ravens and the wolves. In Yellowstone National Park, ravens and wolves run an old playbook - thank you JoAnn Garbin for reminding me of it. Ravens track movement, spot opportunity, and lead wolves to food. Wolves do what ravens can’t - they open what’s sealed. The result is more than a meal for two species, it’s a cascade of benefit that spills outward into the wider ecosystem. It’s also not sentimental, in the strict sense that ravens steal and the wolves adapt. The relationship holds because what each contributes is distinct, and because the net gain outweighs the cost of sharing. [1]
That story has been sitting with me because it’s an uncomfortable mirror for modern food systems. That symbiosis lens matters because the world is getting harsher. In his Davos speech this January, Mark Carney argued that as the rules-based order frays, countries are re-learning a blunt lesson: if you can’t feed yourself, you don’t have many options. [2] That’s the strategic-autonomy frame. But the interesting question is what “feed yourself” should mean in practice, because the strongest food systems aren’t the ones that try to out-muscle nature. They’re the ones that rebuild partnership with it, while diversifying supply and reducing exposure to cascading shocks.
We’ve built a food economy that often behaves as if humans can be self-sufficient from nature, and as if nature’s role is to be ‘managed’ rather than partnered with. The goal has been abundance/yield at the level of the individual farm, firm, or nation. More output, fewer dependencies, tighter efficiency, leaner inventories, just-in-time everything! It looks like strength on one level, but let’s be honest with ourselves, it is weakness tho.
Food is not a supply chain, rather it’s a living relationship
If you strip the poetry out of it, food is a system of mutual dependencies between people and the rest of life. Soil biology turns dead matter into fertility, pollinators deliver yield, diverse landscapes suppress pests, and water cycles buffer drought and flood. In return, human choices determine whether those partners thrive or crash. The systemic risk point is simple. When we degrade the living functions we rely on, we don’t just damage nature. We also erode the resilience of the food system itself.
One of the referenced papers below on systemic risk makes this explicit. It describes how we can ‘lock in’ a version of resilience that delivers apparent benefits like cheap food in the short term, while maintaining vulnerability in the long term through degradation of ecosystem services such as soil health, pest control and pollination. [5] That’s symbiosis breaking down in slow motion.
Why this is suddenly a national security issue?
The second paper pushes the same logic into the acute zone. It explores how chronic vulnerabilities in the UK food system create a “tinderbox”, then maps plausible acute triggers that could tip disruption into crisis. As far as I can surmise, their expert elicitation converges on three headline triggers: a cyber-attack, a major extreme weather event, and an international conflict. Any of these can spark availability and affordability shocks, and those shocks can cascade into fear, instability, and potentially unrest far too quickly and easily. [6]
Of course it’s more complicated than that and a few key details matter greatly here.
First, the paper stresses interconnectedness, in the sense that these aren’t neat, separate scenarios. Triggers can correlate and compound, and impacts can overlap in time. That’s exactly how systemic risk behaves, and why ‘business as usual’ risk thinking is simply old hat - it vastly underestimates the tail. [6]. Second, the weak points are not only ‘out there’ in geopolitics or weather. They’re also ‘in here’ in the way we’ve optimised our systems: consolidated supply chains, just-in-time logistics, and digitised infrastructure. A social backdrop of inequality and food insecurity that turns price spikes into social fracture rather than inconvenience. [6]
When you look at it through a symbiosis lens, this reads like a system that has tried to minimise dependency, and in doing so has become dangerously dependent on a narrow set of assumptions.
The raven and wolf rules applied to food systems
The raven and wolf story frames mutualism as something that depends on conditions, not virtue. Conditions like mutual value, real difference in contribution, readiness (having enough capacity to contribute), adapting together, and frequent touchpoints that keep feedback loops alive. [1] Translate those into food-system design and you get something practical.
Mutual value means nature must ‘get paid’ in biological terms. If soil is excessively ploughed, hedgerows removed, pollinators poisoned, waterways overloaded, the relationship becomes extractive. You can still produce food for a while, but you’re drawing down the asset. Difference means diversity is not a lifestyle preference. It’s structural risk reduction. The UK paper’s experts repeatedly prioritise diversification: of production, supply chains, distribution, and even diets. Diversity reduces single points of failure. It also rebuilds ecological function. [6]
Readiness means the system needs an ‘enough’ floor. Readiness isn’t just about farms; rather it’s household food security, farmer viability, logistics capacity, and community networks. The paper highlights community-level resilience planning and stronger safety nets as part of reducing the chance that shocks turn into crisis. [6] Adapt together means shifting from rigid optimisation to learning systems. The systemic risk paper argues for interventions that go beyond shallow tweaks and into deeper leverage points, including institutions, feedback loops, and intent. In other words, not only new kit, but new rules of the game and new ways of coordinating. [5]
Frequent touchpoints means better watchpoints for early warning. The systemic risk work uses the idea of watchpoints and monitoring that reveal when risk is becoming more likely, including signals of eroding resilience before visible collapse. It even gives a concrete example: monitoring pollination resilience via species richness and functional composition, not just pollination ‘state’. [5]
A watchpoints mindset for food security
If systemic risk is about cascades, then governance is about seeing earlier, and acting earlier. Watchpoints are how you notice the relationship is fraying before it snaps. Some watchpoints are ecological (soil organic matter, pollinator diversity, water quality, pest pressure). Some are infrastructural (inventory buffers, cold chain robustness, digital security). Some are social (food insecurity, trust in institutions, local capacity to respond).
The UK food crisis paper is blunt that system-wide interventions matter because fragmentation in governance is itself a vulnerability. Longer-term policy thinking, genuine food-system coordination, stronger international collaboration, and a forum for diverse voices were prioritised above many technical fixes. [6]. That, to me, is another way of saying: symbiosis is maintained by relationships and feedback, not by optimisation alone.
Food security is also a health strategy
What I liked about the BBC Food show is that it refused to treat food security as only a farming problem. [7] It put extreme weather, water scarcity and logistics on the same page as obesity and ultra-processed diets. That matters because demand is a resilience lever. If we keep optimising for cheap, energy-dense food and ever more strained supply chains, we’re locking in fragility. If we move towards healthier diets and fewer resource-intensive calories, we ease pressure on land and water, reduce exposure to import shocks, and give ecosystems space to recover. That’s symbiosis, expressed as national resilience.
So what does a “symbiotic” food strategy look like?
If I had to compress it into a few design moves, drawn directly from the expert priorities in the UK paper:
Build resilience through diversification across production, supply chains, distribution, and diets. Treat agroecology and regenerative approaches as resilience infrastructure, not niche ideology, particularly for weather volatility. Invest in the unglamorous basics that prevent cascades: infrastructure, farmer support, and the capacity to adapt what we grow where as conditions change. Take cyber risk seriously as a food risk, because digitised, consolidated systems fail fast when attacked. Stop pretending the social layer is separate. In a stressed system, dignity, trust, and safety nets aren’t ‘nice to have’. They’re shock absorbers. [6] And, crucially, align the incentives so that the living partners in the system can recover. If nature is the co-producer, then degradation is a balance-sheet problem, not a side effect.
A closing thought
The raven and the wolf don’t succeed because they’re saints. They succeed because the system rewards complementarity, and because each has enough capacity to contribute what the other can’t. Food security is the same kind of challenge. We don’t get resilience by trying to stand apart from nature. We get resilience by rebuilding the bargain, and by designing the conditions where mutualism is the rational outcome again.
So, if you were tasked w/ building a UK food security dashboard, what would you put on it as your top 5 watchpoints?
References:
[1] JoAnn Garbin, “The Ravens and the Wolves”, Innovating Out Loud (Substack)
[2] “Special address by Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada”, World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2026 transcript and session page
[3] Reporting excerpts of Carney’s “feed itself, fuel itself or defend itself” line (for cross-checking phrasing), The Independent and The Guardian
[4] Context on domestic food inflation pressures alongside Carney’s geopolitical positioning, Reuters
[5] Bridle S, Smith E, Jones A, Falloon P, Pilley V, Hasnain S, Stanbrough L, Vogel C, Douglas C, Doherty B, et al. ‘Potential Pathways and Solutions to Acute Food System Crisis in the UK’. Sustainability, 2026 18, 1342. https://doi.org/10.3390/su18031342
[6] Oliver TH, Doherty B, Dornelles AZ, et al. ‘Appraising cascading systemic risks, ‘watchpoints’, and interventions – methodological reflections’. Global Sustainability. 2026 9:4. doi:10.1017/sus.2025.10038
[7] BBC radio show transcript summary and “Sustainable Foods Conference Insights”