Feeding the beast: How New York’s farmers, distributors and food banks are coping with coronavirus
This week, amid reports of coronavirus outbreaks causing meatpacking plants to shutter and grocery stores in some parts of the U.S. struggling to keep shelves stocked, Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue sought to dispel concerns about food shortages.
It is true that, at least for now, the U.S. produces enough food for its citizens, but the gap between producers and consumers is resulting in spot shortages, which are hitting food banks that serve the poor especially hard. The effects of the coronavirus pandemic have rippled across the food supply chain, from dairy farmers and meat processing plants to restaurants and school cafeterias, exposing major vulnerabilities in the system that may not be so easy to fix.
This trend has been on display in New York City, which was already home to approximately 1.2 million food-insecure residents before it became the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S. In response to this surge in demand, Gordon said Food Bank for New York City “sent out more than 5 million meals across the city” in the last month, a “considerable uptick” from the roughly 3.5 million monthly meals the organization typically distributes. City Harvest is on track to deliver a total of 68 million pounds of food by the end of its fiscal year on June 30, 2 million more pounds than originally projected.
In response to the closures, City Harvest has partnered with other community organizations to open up 10 new “Emergency Food Distribution Sites” in high-need neighborhoods. To facilitate social distancing at its Mobile Markets, all food is now prebagged for quick and easy pickup. Late last month, shortly after New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo ordered the closure of all nonessential businesses — a category that does not include groceries or takeout restaurants — Mayor Bill de Blasio appointed Sanitation Department Commissioner Kathryn Garcia to serve as the COVID-19 Food Czar.
“The first wave was catering companies that were canceling all their events, so all that food was being donated to City Harvest,” said Droz. “The second wave was restaurants.” “That’s why we had such a surge in donations because ... we still had excess products,” said Walker. The company has since made changes to its inventory to better meet the needs of the current market, eliminating many of those specialty items that are no longer in demand.
Walker explained that Baldor was somewhat uniquely positioned to take this unfamiliar turn because it already had established an e-commerce site for business customers and had a team of developers on-call who could quickly make necessary changes to the website in order to open up the catalog of products to the general public.
“We’re not quite sure how long we’re going to be in this business, so we’re trying not to completely reinvent our catalog, but we are making adjustments daily,” Walker said, noting that, while the ultimate goal is a return to business as usual, it’s unclear when realistically that will happen. FarmersWhile Baldor was able to simply eliminate items like baby mustard greens from its inventory when its restaurant customers stopped ordering, that’s not exactly an option for the small farms that specialize in those crops.
Ammerman said that the recent disruptions to the food supply chain have been particularly problematic for New York’s dairy industry, the largest component of the state’s agriculture. Most dairy farmers, he explained, don’t have the capacity to process milk themselves, but rather must send the raw product to outside plants to be pasteurized or processed into butter, cheese, yogurt or other products.
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