The Next Catastrophe Heading Our Way: Food-- And What Trump And Congress Are NOT Doing About It

-by Helen Klein

The nation’s food supply is not going very well. What will be done about it? Is anyone in government looking at it?

Last week on MSNBC, Chris Hayes aired, "The Real Reason Grocery Shelves are Empty" (above). This segment highlighted the massive amounts of food currently rotting and being dumped: thousands of gallons of milk are being spilled from storage facilities, eggs are being smashed and farmers are plowing under tons of vegetables. Why? Because there is a huge discrepancy between food grown for commercial distribution, such as for schools, restaurants, hotels and businesses, and food grown for consumers, to be sold in grocery stores. Due to the widespread closings of so many businesses and the ubiquitous stay-at-home orders in most states, the demand for food for commercial purposes has virtually dried up: farmers in this industry no longer have buyers. Yet consumer demand has increased exponentially. The supply chains are under stress because there is no method to send the food predestined for commercial entities to people and families.

Chris Hayes asked Jessie Newman, Wall Street Journal agricultural reporter, an obvious question: Why can’t food grown for commercial purposes be sent to consumers? She explained that unfortunately, this could not be easily and quickly done. The answer, it turns out, is complicated. The supply chains for commercial and consumer food distribution are vastly different. The relationships, distribution patterns, food preferences and packaging cannot easily be shifted from one to the other. To do so would be extremely challenging and costly. And take time.

While this problem has a few parallels to the current oil crisis, with no one needing or wanting oil and businesses no longer needing or wanting commercially grown food, food IS and always will be needed and wanted, regardless of the reasons behind why it is grown. The demand at Food Banks and supermarkets all over the country is skyrocketing.





On MSNBC’s The Last Word (4/16/20), Lawrence O’Donnell focused on the lengthy lines of cars and hours long waits at Food Banks, demonstrating the tremendous and drastically increasing demand for consumer food. In Dallas, over 3,000 cars lined up. In San Antonio, over 10,000 cars lined up. Eric Cooper, who runs a food bank there, said the demand is unprecedented: the food is going out as fast as it is coming in. There is a two to three week supply in their warehouses and it may soon run out. Then what? The Feed America network has seen explosive growth and is now desperate for food. The supply chains are struggling to keep up. Scenes are similar in Los Angeles, New York, and many other places around the country. And this is only the beginning of this critical aspect of the pandemic catastrophe.

Massive unemployment and loss of income are having drastic deleterious effects on feeding families. People are behind in their rent and car insurance and many have lost their health insurance, thanks to the employment tied policies that everyone was touting just a few months ago. Food is a necessity and is becoming the first priority. The desperation will only increase in coming months.

In 1943, the psychologist, Abraham Maslow presented his famous Hierarchy of Needs that motivate human beings. This construct continues to have meaning today. Maslow identified five categories of human need:

• Physiological
• Safety
• Love
• Esteem
• Self-actualization

While people in industrialized nations have taken pride in rising up the pyramid to be the best they can be, the pandemic is drawing Americans back down to the base and very foundation of the hierarchy: Physiological needs. These needs are the requirements of life and essential for survival: needs such as food, air, shelter, clothing, sleep, etc. According to Maslow, we can only reach for needs further up the hierarchy when people feel they have sufficiently satisfied the previous need.

There is some overlap in the various needs, which means that lower levels may take precedence back over the higher levels at any time. Right now, the American dream appears to be moving backwards and sliding down the pyramid. We are heading back to the basics of human survival. Will many Americans soon be starving? Will this become another horrendous parallel to the 1930’s Depression?

What can be done about all of the commercially produced food that is being destroyed and wasted while Food Banks and supermarket shelves are inching close to empty?

This exposes another blatant need for the federal government to step in and act swiftly to prepare for increasingly massive food shortages. The Defense Production Act comes to mind as a critical tool that could be used in fighting hunger in the USA. Will Trump use it for this purpose? As far as I know, this has not even come up yet as a possibility. Of course, he has refused to use the Act to supply Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), critical in fighting this virus, so why would he be willing to use it for food?

Reading up on the ACT, which came into being in 1950 during the Korean War, there are three main sections:

The first authorizes the President to require businesses to accept and prioritize contracts for materials deemed necessary for national defense. This is regardless of potential loss incurred to the businesses and allows for prohibition of hoarding or price gouging.

The second authorizes the President to establish mechanisms to allocate materials, services and facilities to promote national defense.

The third authorizes the President to control the civilian economy so that scarce and critical materials necessary for defense are available.

The Act also authorizes the President to requisition property, force industry to expand production and the supply of basic resources, impose wage and price controls, settle labor disputes, etc., and allocate raw materials towards national defense.

The ACT seems perfectly designed to mobilize the food industry and shift commercial food production to consumer food production. To do so NOW, before the shortages become overwhelming, would make perfect sense. Being proactive is the name of the game.

Thus far the Trump administration has refused to implement the ACT. If only common sense, practicality and expertise had any place in the current administration. The coming disaster with food seems obvious but there has been little discussion about this or proposals to deal with it.

Congress, of course, could take a leading role in this rising catastrophe and allocate money to shift food production from commercial to consumer, but little attention has been paid to this issue in the media. So far, none of the bills being proposed in Congress address food.

This is a very complicated issue. Should surplus commercial food be donated? Should the government buy it from the producers and promote industry to repackage and redistribute it? How can this be done? At the very least, critical discussions should be taking place by experts in the field. Perhaps Jared Kushner could take it on?

Self Portrait As Gatherer (2017) by Julie Heffernan

Trapped in the meltdown: From the NYT, "Newly poor swell lines at food banks nationwide"

From the East Hampton (NY) Star: Volunteers handed out celery
and eggplant at the East Hampton Food Pantry on Tuesday.

"Working-class people who suddenly lose jobs or homes often find themselves at sea, unsure how to navigate the system or ashamed to seek help."

-- from Julie Bosman's New York Times report (see below)

I know this is a long piece, but I think you'll see why I didn't want to cherry-pick it. This is the sort of thing that is apparently unknown to the gentry at the Wall Street Journal editorial pages -- as Noah suggested in his wonderful Monday rant, "The Real Doom-and-Gloomers," about the brutal cluelessness of those relatively unhurting economic status-quo-niks, not to mention the clueless congressional Republicans who for cynical hoped political advantage Just Say No. -- Ken

Newly Poor Swell Lines at Food Banks Nationwide

By JULIE BOSMAN
The New York Times, February 20, 2009

MORRISTOWN, N.J. -- Cindy Dreeszen and her husband live in one of the wealthiest counties in the United States. They have steady jobs, his at a movie theater and hers at a government office. Together, they earn about $55,000 a year.

But with a 17-month-old son, another baby on the way, and, as Ms. Dreeszen put it, "the cost of everything going up and up," the couple went to a food pantry this month to ask for some free groceries.

"I didn't think we'd even be allowed to come here," said Ms. Dreeszen, 41, glancing around at the shelves of fruit, whole-wheat pasta and baby food. "This is totally something that I never expected to happen, to have to resort to this."

Once a crutch for the most needy, food pantries have responded to the deepening recession by opening their doors to what one pantry organizer described as "the next layer of people," a rapidly expanding group of child-care workers, nurse's aides, real estate agents and secretaries who are facing a financial crisis for the first time. Over all, demand at food banks across the country increased by 30 percent in 2008 from the previous year, according to a survey by Feeding America, which distributes more than two billion pounds of food every year. And while pantries usually see a drop in demand after the holiday season, many in upscale suburbs this year are experiencing the opposite.

Here in Morris County (median household income, $82,173), the Interfaith Food Pantry added extra hours this month after seeing a 24 percent increase in customers and 45 percent increase in food distributed in November, December and January compared with the same period last year.

In Lake Forest, Ill., a wealthy Chicago suburb, a pantry in an Episcopal church that used to attract people from less affluent towns nearby has been flooded with people who have lost jobs. In Greenwich, Conn., one pantry organizer reported a "tremendous" increase in demand for food since December, with out-of-work landscapers and housekeepers as well as real estate professionals who have not made a sale in months filling the line.

And amid the million-dollar houses of Marin County, Calif., a pantry at the San Geronimo Valley Community Center last month changed its policy to allow people to stop by once a week instead of every other week, since there are so many new faces in line alongside the regulars.

"We're seeing people who work at banks, for software firms, for marketing firms, and they're all losing their jobs," said Dave Cort, the executive director. "Here we are in big, fancy Marin County, but we have people who are standing in line with their eyes wide open, thinking, ‘Oh my God, I can't believe I'm here.' "

The demand is not limited to pantries, which distribute groceries from food banks, supermarket surplus and individuals who donate through church or school can drives. The number of food-stamp recipients was up by 17 percent across New York State, and 12 percent in New Jersey, in November from a year before. When a mobile unit of the Essex County welfare office, as part of a pilot program to distribute food-stamp applications in other counties, stopped in Shop-Rite parking lots recently in Morris County, it was swamped.

"If one of our richest counties has people signing up for food stamps who have never signed up before, that indicates the depth of this problem with the lack of food," said Kathleen DiChiara, executive director of Community FoodBank of New Jersey. "It's the canary in the coal mine."

Experts said that chronically poor people tend to adapt to the periods where money is scarce by asking for support from friends or tapping into social services, but that working-class people who suddenly lose jobs or homes often find themselves at sea, unsure how to navigate the system or ashamed to seek help.

It is those people who, over the last several months, have started arriving in growing numbers at food pantries, which are often the first tentative step for those whose incomes are too high to qualify for government assistance. (Many pantries have a no-questions policy, though they might determine how many bags of groceries a customer can receive by the number of people in their household.)

"These are people who never really had to ask for help before," said Brenda Beavers, human services director for the Salvation Army in New Jersey, which dispenses emergency food supplies at 30 pantries throughout the state. "They were once givers and now they're having to ask for assistance."

In Morristown, Rosemary Gilmartin, executive director of the Interfaith Food Pantry, has over the last several months watched a steady stream of new faces pushing shopping carts among the cardboard boxes on metal shelves in a former nursing home. In 2008, the pantry gave away 620,000 pounds of food, a 24 percent increase from 2007.

The Interfaith Food Bank in Morristown in 2007
(from the Newark Star-Ledger)

Along with fresh apples and Nature's Path Organic Soy Plus cereal, Ms. Gilmartin, who began volunteering at the pantry 13 years ago, gives children "Dora the Explorer" books. In the past few months, she has found herself fielding more inquiries about social service programs like the Earned Income Tax Credit from people who clearly had never before hovered this close to the poverty line.

"They look shellshocked," she said. "I've had people walk back out and say, ‘I can't do this.' "

She recalled one recent walk-in, a television sound engineer who lost his house to foreclosure. "His life just went reee-eeer," Ms. Gilmartin said, twirling her finger in a downward circle.

Usually, the pantry distributes food at two locations several mornings a week, including most Saturdays, and on the first and third Wednesday evenings of the month. But this month, Ms. Gilmartin decided to also open on the second Wednesday because she has been having trouble accommodating everyone.

By 5:30 p.m. on that Wednesday, a half-hour before the pantry was to open, a line of nearly two dozen had formed. Once inside, people were escorted individually through the shelves of low-fat mozzarella cheese, dried beans and Pepperidge Farm chocolate chunk cookies, where a few paused -- often reluctantly -- to explain what had brought them.

"A deadbeat husband and a loss of a job," said one woman in her 20s, who spoke on condition of anonymity because she did not want her friends to know she had been visiting the pantry. It was her second visit. The first time, she could barely get out of her car. "Let me put it this way -- it took me a long time to come here," the woman said as she added a bag of lentils to her cart. "I felt like a loser. I felt like a total lowlife."

A woman wearing gold earrings and a red Vera Bradley bag over her shoulder, who is in her 50s and gave only her first name, Louise, said she had recently lost her job and has been struggling to pay her bills.

"I can understand why people would be embarrassed to come here," she said, as she loaded her groceries into the trunk of her silver Chevy Malibu. "I guess I am a little embarrassed."

Joan Verba, 53, said she had been coming up short financially since she quit her job as an accountant after her husband became ill with cancer. When her husband died, leaving her and a 14-year-old son, she put off plans to re-enter the work force.

"The job market is so bad right now," she said. "My son eats 24-7. I just need this to supplement my food bills."

Her mother, Carol Morrison, stood nearby. "I'm just here for moral support," she said, inspecting the shelves. "And nosiness."

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