Building Community Food Resilience: Tracing Socio‐Technical Infrastructures of Ollas Comunes in Chile’s Food Deserts

Abstract

Food deserts highlight the uneven distribution of food infrastructure that disproportionately impacts marginalised communities, exacerbating their food insecurity. Residents in these areas face daily food access challenges and, in the global South context, rely on informal markets and community‐based solidarity networks. This article seeks to draw lessons for resilience from community‐led initiatives that contribute to food security in urban food deserts. It focuses more specifically on ollas comunes (community soup kitchens) in Santiago, Chile, understanding the role these played before, during and after the Covid‐19 pandemic. Using institutional ethnography, the article examines how ollas comunes address immediate community food insecurity, and sustain themselves over time through complex, dynamic socio‐material assemblages. The research considers how relationships are structured between participants, and how space, material objects, norms, and routines, shape and reconfigure interactions and outcomes. The findings reveal critical factors that bolster community food resilience: the involvement of diverse actors, their adaptive capacity, and their ability to reconfigure social and material networks. Additionally, the research highlights the uneven barriers to resilience, faced by formal and informal groups. This study contributes to rethinking urban food environments from the ground up, emphasising how bottom‐up initiatives respond to systemic gaps within food deserts. It offers critical insights for policy and planning to build food resilience, highlighting the need to support and recognise the social infrastructures that sustain communities in times of crisis and beyond.