How Coronavirus Disrupted the U.S. Food System

orders changed everything. Farmers had crops spoil without any buyers, meat processors closed due to outbreaks, distributors lost sixty of their business volume, and food banks who relied on grocery stores and restaurants are struggling as the need has surged. Kevin Rector, reporter at the l A Times, joins us for the chaotic food system. Thanks for joining us, Kevin, Thanks for having me. I wanted to talk about the

US food system throughout this whole coronavirus pandemic. It's really been upended starting on March sixteen, when the governor basically asked restaurants to shut down. I mean, it just created this whole ripple effect on how delicate the food supply chain really is in the state and in the country. Really, this is happening all over the place. Obviously we're gonna talk about California specifically, but it's particularly crazy here in California.

There's a third of the country's vegetables and two thirds of the fruits and nuts are grown here in this state. So things that are happening here are affecting the entire country, really, And you've spoke to dozens of people farmers, truckers, grocery store executives, restaurateurs, food service providers, and food bank administrators to get a sense of what's going on with the supply chain here. So Kevin, tell us a little bit

about that. In conversations with all of those folks, it was made clear here to me that there's really no sector in the US food system that han't been struck by this. A lot of those sectors work sort of hand in hand with one another. They have sort of stood up where they had stood up, these very complex, precise supply chains for serving the residents of the state in the ways that they were accustomed to eating and

dining out things like that. But like you mentioned, when the governor sort of asked all the restaurants closed down, it totally shattered a lot of that system and forced people to find new ways to match the supply of food with the demand. One of the biggest changes right out of the gate at that point was the food service sector, which supplies not only restaurants, but schools and hotels, etcetera. With a ton of food totally shut down. Some distributors

lost their business overnight. It did depend on what sort of diversification they had among their customers, so some providers for a lot of fast food restaurants and things like that that kept on with their drive through and carry out options maintained a larger centage of their business, but a lot of the industry was just decimated. At the same time, grocery store demand shot up, as everyone knows

a lot more people we're flowing into grocery stores. Particularly in the beginning there there was a lot of hoarding going on. Essentially, people stockpiling food based in part on their uncertainty as to whether or not it would remain available. I think some of that was due to earlier signs that people were seeing that supplies of other things like toilet paper and paper products weren't necessarily on the shelf,

and then it was sort of a vicious cycle. So yeah, it started that way and it's rippled out into a lot of other portions of the system. And that's a huge part of it. That the retail demand went up as people were trying to stockpile very early, honest, like, hey, you gotta be quarantined for two weeks, So people were trying to buy enough food for those two weeks and longer if they had to. And while that demand went up,

the demand on the restaurant side went down. But that rise in the retail demand was not enough to offset what was being lost on the restaurant side, and farmers were hit especially hard to with a bunch of their crops went rotten and they had to kind of restart all over again when the restaurants weren't buying up the bulk of that food. And even still now for them is I have to imagine as tough as restaurants are going to start reopening, it's still unclear what the demand

is going to be. Even if a restaurant opens up, I'm sure they're not going to be a capacity right away. They're limiting how many people are going to be in there. So for farmers, it's a tough game right now. On matching that demand. One thing I heard from almost everyone I talked to is that this was not just the market was one way one day, and then it was a different way the next day, and everyone could start sort of getting in shape and getting in line for

the new way the markets worked. It was just that every day, day after day, the markets were changing, and supply was changing and demand was changing, such that they've been on this whirlwind roller coaster of logistical gymnastics day after day trying to figure out what they can do to sort of shore up their bottom line and also

make sure that food supply doesn't go to waste. So before the pandemic, there was this elaborate system by which grocery stores would sort of kick out excess produce and product to food banks, and then the food banks would supply these sort of local community pantries or stoop kitchens or folks who are providing meals to meet residents. But when the world changed, all of those supply chains were disrupted. Groceries were selling more stock off their shelves, and so

they had less to provide to the food banks. Here in California, in Hollywood, the Hollywood Food Coalition, which has for thirty three years, served hot meals to folks on the street each night. They received a lot of food from studio productions, television and movies. They could speed hundreds of people on night just based on leftover food. All of that shutdown, so suddenly they didn't have that product.

And at the same time, like you said, a lot of the farmers suddenly had a ton of produce that they were having in the old world, gobbled up each day by restaurants no longer having a market. And it talked to one lettuce grower who said they're considering shifting what they grow to grow more iceberg in Romaine, which is what grocery store buyers purchased, and less of the sort of boutique leafs that chefs used in fancy salad. So it was an array of disruptions that all hit

at once. And like you mentioned, some restaurants are coming back online or learning how to do delivery, or working with the apps that people are using more and more, and so the demand on the food service sector hadn't just dropped off a cliff and then stayed there forever. It's it's climbing back up. I think it's shifting a day to day basis of people are having to evolve.

Going back real briefly to what you mentioned about the food banks, I made a note on my article or on the notes, and it just simply wrote, Wow, I didn't know that a single day of production on a film or TV set could have enough leftover meals for hundreds of people on any given day. That's crazy. And and as you say, you know, things shut down almost immediately.

That's all those people are left without nothing. You know, in the first three weeks of April, there was nearly two d hundred thousand people that applied for government food assistant under the cow Fresh program. Food banks were seeing thousands of people in increase that needed food. So it's very tough out there. And one of the ones that we've been hearing a lot when we hear about food

supply chain is in danger our meat processors. We've seen a bunch of plants closed down due to coronavirus outbreaks. People they're getting sick and they've had to change a bunch of stuff in their processing plants to accommodate that. Just as there was sort of increasing demand on processors, including as some processing facilities were shut down because it outbreaks.

There was this added need to better space out employees, so you were looking at increased demand at the same time you were looking at the need to have fewer employees on a production line or things like that. So a lot of meat processors have sort of scrambled to reshape how they operate and in order to meet higher demand for packaged meats and groceries, but at the same time keep their frontline workers safe. And that's part of this picture. It hasn't always gone that way for either

meat processors or for grocery stores. We are seeing employees in the food sector falling sick, and there's pushback from unions and other advocates for these workers to say that the companies who employ them need to be doing more to ensure their safety. And that does take careful consideration. It's another logistical hurdle that these companies are dealing with, just as they are dealing with all of these other logistical hurdles in terms of matching supply with demand. And

it's a top to bottom thing. We've talked about the distributors, the restaurants, the processors, the farmers, all that, but truck drivers also there's been an ebb and flow in how they've been operating. Early on, the demand for their services was huge because everybody was doing all this kind of panic buying, and now that's kind of leveled off a little bit. So for smaller trucking companies, it's hard to

keep them in business. It's hard to keep the haulers pulling all the freight because there's just not as much anymore. Some folks in the trucking industry told me that they're sending out drivers to carry certain halls at a loss because before all of this happened, there was a shortage of truck drivers in the country, and companies work hard to build up stable staffing and have good truck drivers working for them, and they don't want to lose all of that now, so they've been taking jobs at a

loss just to keep their truckers rolling. That's another example of how they rippled out. A lot of the food service industry companies relied a lot on truck drivers to move products across the country and from one area to another, and a lot of that fell off. Folks in the food sector growers and food service sector companies and food banks and all sorts of different folks are trying to reroute transport capacity to where it needs to be so that food doesn't go to waste and people don't go hungry.

The government is trying to step in. USDA has put up plans for billions of dollars to reroute some of the supply on the produce side into the food banks because, like you mentioned, the lines that these food banks are getting longer and longer, so there is a lot of effort out there to figure out the transportation of all

this food as well. I mean, it's tough to predict when some like this will happen and upend the entire food system, but it really just shows us how delicate the balance is and how one little thing affects everything else. You know. Looking to the future, we're gonna have to see what type of new system maybe we can implement that compare you know, people and some of these institutions

that need the food with those that have the food supply. So, I mean, hopefully we can get this under wraps, but for now, it's just a chaotic thing right now and no end in sight really until things get back to normal, if they ever do, so, we'll have to keep an eye out for all of that. Kevin Rector, reporter at the l A. Times, thank you very much for joining us. Thanks. I'm Ostar Ramirez and this has been your daily coronavirus Upteve.

Don't forget that. For today's big news stories, you can check me out of the Daily Give podcast every Monday through Friday, so follow us on I Heart Radio or wherever you get your podcast