How And Why America’s Food System Is Cracking

[mystery-ak]

    Agriculture

How And Why America’s Food System Is Cracking

Before government shut the nation down, Americans ate half their meals outside home.
 
The farmers who served restaurants and cafeterias are dumping meat, veggies, and milk. And it's going to get worse.

By Christopher Bedford
May 14, 2020

America’s food system is cracking.

People are still eating, farmers are still farming, and grocery stores are still open, but in areas around the country, shoppers looking for meat, milk, and other products find empty shelves and limits on what they can purchase — all while farmers from coast to coast are forced to dump milk, plow up vegetables, and euthanize livestock. So what’s happening, and why?

There isn’t a simple answer: No single issue that can be cured by safety gear and precautions, or “phase 1” reopenings. Yes, sick workers in tight conditions are causing a jam-up in processing plants. And yes, a shortage of access to personal protective equipment (PPE) and the threat of employee lawsuits compounds those risks. But the broader problem appears to lie in an unbelievably rapid shift in Americans’ eating habits, and thereby the American food economy, compounded by a draconian reaction and lack of dependable information from elected government.

“You’ve got to remember, it’s a finely tuned system,” John Rieley, a former Sysco food company sales rep and a current councilman for the nation’s top chicken farming county, Sussex Country, Delaware, told The Federalist. That’s usually a good thing — unless you need to play a different note.

more
https://thefederalist.com/2020/05/14/how-and-why-americas-food-system-is-cracking/

[jmyrlefuller]

Sales on chicken nuggets and burger patties? Seems like a logical process. I mean, if ground beef is $4 a pound in bulk (which is way up—on a good week I usually buy in bulk at less than $2 a pound), all those foodservice patties you're not selling all of a sudden become a more attractive substitute.

Thankfully it's a solvable problem.

[LMAO]

Well, Bernie Sanders did say at one time that food lines are a good thing

[roamer_1]

That primary reason for failure is reliance on distribution from the large to the small when it should be the other way around. When it has always been the other way around.

Every township, and every county should be able to supply itself before anything else IN ALL THINGS POSSIBLE.

That means LOCALLY supplied electricity with overage sold to the grid.
That means LOCALLY supplied food and dairy, with overage sold to the grid.

The spirit of self-reliance is an American mainstay.  That is a bottom-up mentality.
I should be self reliant on my own.
My city should be self reliant on its own.  And county, and state, and etc.

DEPENDENCE is the antithesis of INDEPENDENCE.
Why then are we so dependent?