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Repairing Broken Links in the Regional Food Supply Chain WORDS BY LANI FURBANK
Our food system today is a textbook paradox. We see thousands of gallons of milk dumped away, tons of produce left to rot and millions of animals euthanized. Yet miles-long lines form at food banks and grocery stores have spotty inventory. Consumers have been rightfully outraged at the food waste and flummoxed by the incongruities. How can these two realities be so incompatible, yet exist side by side? The simple answer is the food system wasn’t built for this. For decades, our supply chain has been methodically consolidated and streamlined to make cheap food fast – from fields to grocery shelves. The result is a massive, centralized system with little room for error. Add a global pandemic, and the whole thing starts to crumble. The little cracks that have always existed widen and reach a breaking point, and the operations in motion are too big and too rigid to quickly pivot. “A large ship is hard to turn around,” says Dena Leibman, 16 | JUNE 2020
executive director of Future Harvest Chesapeake Alliance for Sustainable Agriculture. The disconnects we see in the headlines are a result of broken links in the supply chain at various points, namely packaging, distribution and labor. According to the United States Department of Agriculture, about 30 percent of daily calories for the average American are consumed outside of the home – at restaurants, schools, universities, hotels and other institutions. When these settings abruptly closed, demand shifted heavily to grocery stores. Producers who supply large-scale institutions were then stuck with mountains of inventory and costly obstacles in reaching direct-to-consumer markets. Automated packaging plants would require millions of dollars in investment to change from half-pints of milk for school lunches to gallon containers for the grocery store, for instance. Then there’s the issue of sheer volume – people don’t consume potatoes and onions in the
