What COVID-19 Reveals About the U.S. Food Supply

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: When it comes to where the coronavirus started, there are all sorts of conspiracy theories and accusations out there. But the evidence so far points to a food market in Wuhan, China. And the story has now come full circle, with the spread of COVID-19 sending shockwaves through the whole food industry, from restaurants closing their doors to crops rotting in fields. Our next guest says the global supply chains are in disarray. Amanda Little is author of “The Fate of Food: What We’ll Eat in a Bigger, Hotter, Smarter World,” from the field to the plate. She joins our Hari Sreenivasan to talk all about it.

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HARI SREENIVASAN: Amanda, you’re an author. You’re a professor. You have been writing about food for a long time. I want to start with a tweet that I saw from Jose Andres a while back. This was a few weeks ago. And it was so stark on — he said, how are both of these things happening at the same time? One was an image of a mountain of potatoes that was essentially rotting because it couldn’t get to people who needed it, and then the other picture was of a line 10,000-cars-long for food in Texas. How — what’s happening with our supply chain? How are both of these true?

AMANDA LITTLE, AUTHOR, “THE FATE OF FOOD: WHAT WE’LL EAT IN A BIGGER, HOTTER, SMARTER WORLD”: It’s extraordinary, right, that, at this moment, we have a huge oversupply of vegetables, milk, meat, to the point where we’re plowing under fresh produce, we’re dumping milk, we’re euthanizing animals. And yet there’s so much need. There’s so much threat of hunger. And I think we’re even beginning to hear what feels like this impending famine, at a time when, again, we’re just dumping all these really valuable, high- nutrient, high-flavor food resources in this country. What we’re beginning to see is what has been true for decades, which is that our food supply is incredibly complex. The way that it’s managed isincredibly archaic. And, ideally, this kind of exposure of these realities will help us reform in a really important and long overdue way. We have 15 agencies that deal with food safety alone, right, the FDA, the CDC, the Department of labor, the USDA, the EPA. All these agencies in some one way or another, and others, are part of what — maintaining food security and a reliable food supply.So, what happens when you have to get all of the players in these agencies communicating, coordinating, trying to figure out how to partner with the private sector to get those rotting potatoes to where they can be consumed, that is not working. It’s very complex. It needs to be — we need innovation and creative solution at this moment. And it’s both traumatic, but also potentially very generative of solutions.

SREENIVASAN: What you’re talking about is reforming a food management system that’s from a different era. I mean, you have called it archaic before. How would you fix that?

LITTLE: It is important to remember that the existing — the reason that this is so segmented and sort of diffuse and decentralized, the reason that we don’t have a single authority for food safety is in part because this management system evolved piecemeal 40, 50 years ago and more. So it’s very outdated. It’s very out of step with not only just the realities of how food is produced in 2020, but also with the realities of what happens when you have a massive disruption like a pandemic. Interestingly, President Trump has put a lot of emphasis on the importance of having nimble agencies, nimble government, the ability to respond creatively, cut out your bureaucrat red tape, but we aren’t — we’re not seeing any of that right now coming from the Oval Office and from the ag secretary, for example. The COVID response plan that they have in place is sort of, let’s get back to the way things were and try to kind of restore status quo. What we need to do is think about why what was normal was dysfunctional, and how to reform and adapt, yes, how to bring efficiencies, move beyond a lot of that sort of bureaucratic segmentation and dysfunction, and really build resilience and sustainability into food systems. It’s not happening yet. Again, it’s, let’s run back to status quo. And what we’re coming to see, as you pointed out, is that there’s so many problems with status quo, with food waste, that we have been wasting 33 to 40 percent of the food produced in the United States and globally for decades, and without much of a solution there. Food safety, nutrition and the quality of our foods, market prices, and crop subsidies, a lot of that is now coming into stark relief. How do we manage all these different issues more effectively with better sort of coordination among all the different agencies that are managing these issues?

SREENIVASAN: One of your recent columns from Bloomberg was about why the meatpacking industry and these plants have become clusters for the coronavirus 19, really getting into the group of workers that’s working there. Explain that for somebody who might not have read it.

LITTLE: At the moment, there are 10,800 or more, actually, COVID-positive cases in meat production facilities. There are about 800 meat processing facilities in the country. Only a portion of those are the very high-scale, large-scale production facilities. But in those huge facilities that process, in some cases, 20,000 hogs a day, for example, you have shoulder-to-shoulder line work. It’s — they’re wet conditions. They’re exactly the kind of conditions in which COVID-19 or any other communicable disease can be transferred among employees. So, we have seen that happen. A lot of the towns and cities that house large meat processing facilities have become COVID hot spots. I reported a Smithfield pork processing facility in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. And among the 3,700 employees, about a quarter of them, about 1,000 employees, contracted COVID. And it became, of course, a huge public health problem within the company, but also a problem for the hog producers who were supplying the plant, again, 20,000 hogs coming into this plant every day. The plant shuts down for two weeks, and suddenly all of those hog producers have nowhere to put their hogs. There are about 550 independent hog farmers who supply the plant. So, the hog farmers are euthanizing their animals or coming up on real crisis and disruption in their own supply. The workers, most of the minimum-wage workers, most of them immigrants, are being exposed to a potentially life-threatening disease. And the company is trying to figure out how to keep its revenues online. And, by the way, this is again, an example of a scenario where there are existing problems and existing challenges that have been around long before COVID. Meat workers or employees in these processing plants face 17 times the injury rate of employees in other industries, right? These are fast-paced — it’s fast-paced work. And so if you’re sick or you’re burdened or you’re under emotional stress, it’s much harder to do that work.

SREENIVASAN: Now, what’s the role of the employer here when it comes to, as you point out, a work force that’s very diverse, that might — for whom English might not be a first language, how they’re given the information on what their choices are, if they have any, what kinds of precautions they need to be taking? I mean, the CDC looked into this a little bit as well, and they said that sometimes bosses are incentivizing people to show up every day. And then you get a bonus at the end of the month if you don’t have any absences. Well, that just creates the absolute wrong incentive if you have somebody who’s sick who shouldn’t be there.

LITTLE: It’s so troubling, honestly. In the case of the Smithfield Sioux Falls plant, exactly that was going on. So, there are 40 languages spoken at this plant and 100 dialects spoken at this plant. The workers in the plant had been getting all kinds of information from their families all around the world that there were serious COVID threats percolating globally across Asia and Europe in particular and across the African continent. They had been going to their union leaders, who had then been going to company management and saying, this is a real problem. We want to be prepared for it. And they have been asking for proper PPE. They have been asking for testing. They have been asking for social distancing and breaks for weeks before the plant was actually taken offline. And, in fact, the company had offered a bonus of $500 per employee if they didn’t call in sick during the month of April. So, yes, the incentive had been on, if you’re sick, show up anyway. That had been the message. At the same time, there have been statements by company representatives and by the governor of South Dakota, Governor Noem, that had said, we think that the disease may be spreading among these workers, not because of conditions at the plant, but because of their living conditions in their home and because the — they live in large communities. The implication is that these are unsanitary living conditions. So much of this has been locked away, right? I eat my breakfast sausage or my bacon, and I’m not thinking about the conditions of the workers. I’m not thinking about, am I paying the true cost for this meat? I’m not thinking about, should we have the volume of affordable meat that we have in our lives? Should we be paying more for that? Should we be considering alternative proteins? A lot of those questions for consumers are becoming very real. And, again, what are the conditions for the workers who produce this food that we have kind of come to take for granted? That’s very important for us all to be dealing with right now.

SREENIVASAN: The meat industry, for its part, says, hey, listen, if these shutdowns continue, you are going to see shortages on grocery store shelves, and we have been deemed essential by the government. So, is there that likelihood that not only are we going to see a price spike, but a supply shortage now?

LITTLE: Let’s be clear that U.S. consumers are not going to be forced to go vegan anytime soon. Right? Some of the messages we have been getting from executives at the major meat produce — companies has been, right, this is a food crisis, we’re going to see meat vanishing off of shelves. The threats to protein production are real. But meat companies have some reserves of product in cold storage that can temporarily fulfill consumer demand while the plants remain offline. If these production facilities have recurrence after recurrence of the disease, and waves and waves of shutdowns, that is the real food crisis.

SREENIVASAN: Are those reforms that you would like to see, are they happening anywhere now? Are there proposals on the table where they could happen?

LITTLE: Representative Rosa DeLauro has introduced us plan, an action plan for food security and food safety. And that is the sort of broadest and most comprehensive plan that I have seen so far emerge. She’s looking at worker safety and ways in which we can not only support the CDC recommendations for safe work environments, but also enforce them. So, that plan, the DeLauro Plan, action plan, I think, is hopeful. It’s going to be difficult to get the kind of bipartisan support that she needs for it, so it’s not going to happen in the next five, 10 days, which is when a lot of important decisions need to be made. But it is a great start for talking about kind of this broader, holistic, sort of comprehensive look at, how do we build more nimble and sustainable food supply chains? And she’s got backing from chef Jose Andres. She’s got backing from former Agriculture Secretaries Glickman and Vilsack. And I think there’s a lot of interest. A lot of the ag states, a lot of the states that depend heavily on agricultural revenue see what’s happening to their producers, and they want safety and resilience.

SREENIVASAN: Do you think that the way that we farm today makes us more susceptible to the spread of diseases like this or viruses like this? Does that increase the likelihood that this will continue to be worse, especially in places like meatpacking plants?

LITTLE: In the United States, we import more than half of our fruits, I think about 40 percent of our vegetables, even though we’re a huge producer of food ourselves, right? So that creates vulnerability, and whether it’s disruption in the supply itself because of climate pressures, for example, or whether it’s the distribution systems themselves are taken out by a storm or by a global pandemic. How deeply interwoven our food systems are and how vulnerable we are to disruptions elsewhere is becoming very clear. And I want to be clear that it’s very important to acknowledge that there are advantages to large-scale food production. I am not saying that we should eliminate industrial farming and that we should all go back to small and mid-sized farms, because it’s a lot more affordable. We need not just a sustainable food supply. We need an equitable food supply and an affordable, achievable food supply. And so some very large-scale food production is important, because it’s cheaper, essentially. But thinking about how we can really invest resources into efficient, local and regional food webs is becoming more and more urgent and necessary.

SREENIVASAN: Amanda Little of Vanderbilt University and the author of “Fate of Food,” thanks so much for joining us.

LITTLE: Thank you so much.