Tag Archives: food system

Uncovering a Crumbling Food System in a Global Pandemic

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Rice paddy in Vietnam shows prominence of staple crop, one of the most desired goods in the Coronavirus pandemic. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-25/vietnam-s-rice-trade-thrown-into-turmoil-on-export-halt-muddle

In the 1970s, the US increased production of agricultural goods drastically to add to their exports. Today, Chuck Abbott’s article, “Agriculture feels impact as pandemic reshapes U.S. diet, rattles producers,” outlines the current state of domestic agriculture and the impacts of the global food system. Since the year began, not only has the country’s ability to export declined, but imports and domestic sales have been affected as well. Families are buying chicken for easy home dinners, but beef is left on shelves with their businesses seeing food waste and closure; rice prices skyrocket because Vietnam plans on shutting down exports. What this illustrates is how fragile the US and global food system has become, and how a wide-reaching pandemic can cause them to crumble.

Widespread cornfield monocrop. https://www.agweb.com/article/proven-nitrogen-source-no-matter-weather

rom an economic perspective, the way food is produced around the world is efficient and makes the most people happy with the least sacrificed. The theory says that you take your most efficient products and make more and more and more. Production goes up, price goes down, consumption goes up, making production increase again. This cycle engenders specialization, bringing everyone the best goods at the best prices as countries trade.

But if consumer taste or world trade changes at the drop of the dime as it has with the current pandemic, will our current food infrastructure of monocrops and extreme meat production collapse? The surplus of domestically produced meat and the scramble for imported goods like grains are telling. As with the web of biodiversity in times of change, the most overly specialized will fail first. These past few months have only revealed how crippled the world has left its built food system. It no longer resembles a resilient web whose manifold connections sustain it for infinity, but a linear chain riddled with disintegrating links.

Tons of Hungry People and Tons of Wasted Food

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It is the age of a global pandemic and for many Americans, it is a time of heightened economic vulnerability. The services of food banks are in increasing demand from both old and new customers as food insecurity explodes as unemployment skyrockets amid the COVID-19 crisis. At the same time, experts predict that we will be seeing a stark increase in our already high levels of food waste. In a good year, America would see 40 percent of its food wasted – 63 million tons. 

Source: Getty Images

This is not a good year. This is a year of panic buying and closed down markets and cafeterias, meaning that we can expect to see more than 40 percent of our food go to waste. The interconnected problems of food insecurity and food waste are certainly not new, but with the rise of COVID-19 they have gained higher visibility and have more far reaching impacts than ever before. 

Food waste management stretches from farm to table. With farmers leaving up to half of their crops unharvested due to cosmetic imperfections and American households representing the largest source of food wasted, food and money are lost at every step of the food system. While it may be tempting to think that our individual choices about how we consume don’t matter within the larger food system, it is this type of thinking that yields high volumes of food rotting in refrigerators and leaves misshapen foods in grocery stores to go to waste.

By changing our individual behaviors, we can dramatically decrease the waste we contribute and thereby improve the food system. And instead of allowing imperfect foods to go to waste on farms, we should be supporting infrastructure that enables these foods to be transported to food banks. If we make change now, we will save lives.