The Belief Under the Behavior

Why the hardest part of food systems work happens before the plan is written.

Most food and nutrition programs do not fail because the logistics were wrong. They fail because the belief holding the current behavior in place was never mapped, and messaging was mistaken for change. The trucks arrive, the materials are printed, the indicators are tracked, and people go on doing what they were doing after a while. I spent years inside that before I understood what was producing it.

What Humanitarian Planning Teaches, and Where It Stops

Before food, I worked in emergency response. Contingency planning, preparedness planning, response planning, sector by sector, because we were told those are the things that need to happen when a system breaks. The discipline is genuinely valuable. It trains you to see a system first: what fails when water fails, what fails when the health system fails, which resources exist, where the gaps are, and what has to be sequenced so that life goes on.

That way of seeing is the single most transferable skill I carried into food systems work. When I look at a cocoa chain or a rice import pattern now, I am looking for the same things: the underlying system, the available resources, the gap, the sequence.

But the box has a limit, and it took an assessment report to show me where it was. Late in that career, one of the reviews used to evaluate people for advancement told me I needed to be more creative and think outside the box. The irony was that the box had been designed for me, precisely and in writing, as the space where I was meant to work. The instruction to escape a structure after being rewarded for obedience to it is not a personal failing. It is what large bureaucracies produce everywhere, and it is the same thing they often produce in the field: a plan created in headquarters and handed over.

Belief Is Infrastructure, Not Messaging

The correction came from a colleague who worked in a department focused on social and behavior change through communication. We were responding to a cholera outbreak in West Africa and my instinct was speed. Get the hygiene messaging out, tell people to wash their hands, move things along quickly so we could save lives.

He stopped me. It's not propaganda, he said. We need to understand the underlying beliefs before we can have a meaningful conversation with people.

Some years later I was in Ghana during the Ebola scare, when the country had no cases and the entire objective was keeping it that way. On the radio I heard the most effective public health message I have encountered anywhere. It gave the standard protocols, wash your hands and the rest, and then gave the reason: because if you get Ebola, you will not be able to have a wake keeping.

Not that you will die. That you will not have a wake keeping.

In many parts of Ghana, a funeral is a week of ceremony. Wake keeping on Thursday, funeral on Friday, burial on Saturday, thanksgiving service on Sunday. The beliefs around it are serious, including the belief that the departed protect and receive us when we make our own transition. Whoever wrote that ad had done the work of finding out what people were afraid of losing, and then built the message on top of it rather than beside it.

Mortality risk was already the message everyone else was running. It was accurate and it was weaker.

The Same Principle, Applied to Food

A friend of mine was working in Northern Ghana, in communities where children were showing signs of malnutrition. Families were spending real effort acquiring food. Some of it was convenience food, some of it aspirational, processed in both cases. An organization working there asked the communities to grow and consume their traditional ingredients instead. Within a couple of months, the nutritional status of the children had improved.

Nothing was introduced. The traditional greens had been in the backyards the whole time. What had changed, decades earlier, was the belief: that what grew here was backwards, old fashioned, without value in the international system, and worth scrapping for something else. The program did not deliver nutrition. It reversed an instruction.

This is what proximity to origin means as a working method rather than a sentiment. The intervention that works is usually already present in the belief system. The job is to understand it well enough to stop overriding it.

What This Means for Institutions

Cocoa buyers and food companies: A sourcing or sustainability program designed without mapping farmer belief will produce compliance during the audit window and nothing after it. Belief mapping belongs in the design phase, budgeted and staffed, not in the evaluation report where it usually appears as a lesson learned.

Development finance: Funding cycles that reward a completed plan at approval push design upstream to headquarters and leave no time for the sitting down that actually determines adoption. Fund the listening period as a deliverable in its own right, with its own line item, or keep paying for the same adoption failure twice.

Cultural institutions: Traditional food knowledge is not only heritage to document. In Northern Ghana it was the nutritional intervention. Framing it as preservation invites nostalgia; framing it as working infrastructure invites use, and use is what keeps knowledge alive.

Call Forward

Everything here is connected, which is what makes the work feel like Jenga to the people who have to fund it. That is not a reason to avoid it. If your organization is designing something that depends on people changing what they grow, buy or eat, the logistics are the easier half.

👉🏾 Work with me to map the belief before the plan is finalized.

Weekly letters on food, inheritance, and power at origin: Substack