Potatoes, Perishables & Piles of Surplus
My dad loves baked potatoes and my mom loves potato chips (really, she just loves salt; meanwhile, my dad shuns salt). About potatoes, though, and about both of my parents: I think I come from a potato-loving family. It makes sense; we’re second generation Baltimorians, which apparently means we’re obligated, by birth, to acquire an obsession with the local Utz brand potato chips (and an inclination, in particular, for the Crab Chip flavor, coated in Old Bay seasoning). My Dad has recently taken to hunting down every salt-free Utz chip bag in our area, a feat considering their understandably limited supply. Potato-wise, he used to actually make his own chips, popping mandolin-slivered potatoes into our oven. But it was my mom that did the bulk of the cooking growing up. She would regularly whip up batches of our family’s potato salad recipe, and made, more remarkably than the potato salad, a cookbook filled with recipes collected and sometimes birthed by our extended family. My grandma’s mashed potatoes were featured in this collection, a specialty that, despite its status as a side dish, manages to occupy a large swath of my dinner plate every holiday. As a vegan, mashed potatoes are one of my Thanksgiving staples; to others a taken-for-granted side, to me, a beacon of dairy-free delight. The dairy-free-ness of my diet was tough for my grandma to understand and accept, though. She was downright shocked (and appalled, I believe) to find out that butter is not vegan and that, consequently, I no longer consume it. Just last week, however, she sent me a lovingly clipped magazine article featuring a vegan pasta recipe.
Pictures of piles of potatoes are circulating right now. Sorry for the overzealous alliterating, but unprecedented quantities of free potatoes are up for grabs in Idaho and Washington, the top two potato-producing states in the U.S. These potatoes—a billion pounds of Russets in Washington warehouses (sorry, again)—would typically find their way to restaurants, schools, or other commercial venues, perhaps in the form of French fries. But this year is a rather atypical year. Brandy Tucker of the Washington State Potato Commission says that many contracts between buyers and potato farmers have been cancelled since schools are closed and restaurants are shutting down or abbreviating their services.
Belgium faces a similar potato crisis, also a ramification of the international pandemic. Because of the drastically reduced demand for potato-derived food items, “Belgians are being called upon to eat fries at least twice a week as more than 750,000 tons of potatoes are at risk of being thrown away.” Innovative actors in Belgium’s potato industry have responded by launching massive national campaigns branding French fry consumption as patriotic.
The fact is, farmers across the globe are scrambling, unprepared for this sudden shift in the food supply chain. They find themselves stuck with mounds of potatoes planted under the assumption the crop was destined for restaurant-goers’ plates and school lunch trays. Summarizes Ben Feldman:
“Farmers planned for their sales outlets months ago when they planted... If their markets are forced to close and they can’t pivot to other sales outlets, that produce will rot in the field.”
Despite the agricultural sector’s “‘mad rush to figure out supply and demand and who needs what, who has what’,” more often than not, plummeting crop prices are forcing farmers to “‘tear up beautiful vegetables that really could go elsewhere, to food banks, and hospitals, and rest homes.’” The only ‘precedent’ for this level of pre-consumer food waste hearkens back to the Great Depression era, when Americans couldn’t afford to buy the crops farmers were harvesting. (Interestingly, I know people whose quarantine cooking endeavors have involved recipes from the Great Depression like ham and edamame soup—eww, Dad—and pouding chômeur.)
Upon seeing these disturbingly large quantities of unclaimed potatoes, many ask why the harvest can’t simply be rerouted to the 38 million and counting unemployed Americans, the socially-distanced masses descending on drive-thru food banks, or the barren supermarket shelves whose abundance we’ve taken for granted. An inability to properly redistribute food surplus to these eager outlets reflects the rigidity inherent in America’s food system. The structure of our food supply chain renders it “exquisitely vulnerable to the risks and disruptions now facing us,” writes Michael Pollan. In particular, the vulnerabilities can be traced to the concentrated and specialized nature of the way we produce food: “Specialization makes it hard to shift into different markets when disruptions arise” and…
“Concentrated markets dominated by just a handful of companies create narrow bottlenecks that heighten food system fragility.”
Thus, the efficient, automated, careful coordination of our food system, deemed under normal circumstances “a marvel,” now begets waste, frustrating farmers and eaters alike.
Celebrity chef and restaurant owner Tom Colicchio is grappling with this lack of resiliency in the food system on a personal level, his business model compromised in the age of coronavirus. And while he wishes he could use his cooking expertise and restaurant set-up to help feed those in need—just as farmers ideally want to see their potato crops reach food banks—he laments the inadaptability of federal infrastructure that’s preventing such a pivot. The government “should have had a playbook,” he decries,
“There should be a way to move food around the country.”
Instead, food banks are requesting help from the National Guard in their desperate, noble efforts.
But as ‘unprecedented’ as these times may seem, they are merely a dramatic reflection of systemic issues that have always been present. Journalist Sanya Mansoor, attempting to explain the paradoxical abundance of potatoes coupled with the growing lines of hungry Americans, elucidates:
“The coronavirus outbreak is both exposing and exacerbating a long-existing disconnect between excess food and those in need.”
Food waste presents a notoriously “wicked problem” because of its multi-level, many-stakeholder complexity. Disregarding the disruptions wrought by the coronavirus outbreak, America wastes around 40 percent of its food from “farm to fork,” a figure propelling the Environmental Protection Agency to intervene.
In 2015, the EPA released a Food Recovery Hierarchy, an official chart meant to instruct actors in the food industry on optimal outlets for excess or otherwise unwanted food. For implicated grocery store managers, farmers, corporate monopolies, and food pantries, the top priority should be preventing food waste outright, per the hierarchy. The second-best outcome is a redistribution of the surplus among people, then, third, conversion into livestock feed, followed by conversion into compost or biofuel. Also in 2015, pre-coronavirus, the UN set a goal to cut global food waste at the retail and consumer level in half.
Clearly, even prior to the pandemic food was not properly homed in America, not able to be moved around to meet glaring need and prevent tragic waste. These inefficiencies within our purportedly efficient food system stem from diverse causes, with some easier to address than others. For instance, it could be the case that:
The food bank doesn’t have a fridge or freezer to accommodate undesirable food items sent its way.
The grocery store trying to donate its undesirable or unsalable products is not aware if its local food bank has refrigeration or freezing capacity.
The food item is stored improperly at any step of the way, from “farm to fork.”
The grocery store’s shelf inventory isn’t up-to-date.
About-to-expire perishables are not being discounted or put on sale.
Vague expiration labels generate confusion about what is safe to eat.
The staff at the grocery store have not been properly trained, and training doesn’t make financial sense considering their high turnover rates.
Products are over-ordered at the supermarket level.
Products are over-purchased at the consumer level.
There are simply too many options of one type of food category, leaving many varieties unsold.
Plenty of problem areas I have not listed. And one of them—overstocking and resultant spoilage—is rooted in the very premise of grocery stores: they promise “the unsustainable perception of endless abundance.” It is only now that shelves are empty that we begin to inquire more heavily about our fraught food supply chain.
With impressive foresight, scholar Kelsey Walsh wrote, back in 2018, about America’s “epidemic” regarding food security. In a line that could easily have been culled from last week’s newspaper, she provocatively scribes, “an abundance of food becomes a shortage almost entirely through waste.” She furthers,
“A nation producing enough food to feed its entire population, but whose distribution and disposal practices make food security impossible for all to attain, is a nation failing its citizens.”
A mismatch between the producers of food waste and the potential recipients of unsalable food is not new. Hence the existence of groups like Feeding America, Spoiler Alert, and Community Plates, organizations with the mission to connect those with food surplus to the hungry. Before the pandemic struck, Americans were demanding fundamental transformation of the food system, noting a non-functionality that has been there all along.
Part of the non-functionality, arguably, comes from missing coordination between key bodies of knowledge—between the many actors caught up in this ‘wicked’ problem. A group of trained city planners studying waste management solutions in Mississippi’s food sector asserts the need for joint input from (and collaboration between) food system planners and solid waste management planners. Another team of scholars advocates for consistent consultation between food generating businesses and anti-hunger agencies, and yet another promotes managerial insight, pointing to grocery store managers’ understandings of the inner-workings of our food system. Grocery store managers and workers, restaurant owners like Collichio, and potato farmers, among agriculture’s other essential workers, are embedded in this system, attuned to its flaws, and poised with solutions they’ve gleaned from practical experience. I’d argue that suggestions for change even come as a natural consequence of farmers’ never-ending process of trial and error experiments.
While potato farmers’ deals with restaurants fell through because of the unique circumstance of shelter-in-place orders, similar vulnerabilities existed before. “In the U.S., grocers can cancel a produce order from a farm or a supplier whenever they want, for whatever reason, and there's no recourse,” explains Jordan Figueiredo, director of the nascent ‘Ugly’ Fruit Campaign. NPR reported a story in 2019 of a Kenyan farmer grappling with where to send his 75,000 ripe cabbages after the buyer he was working with abruptly cancelled their agreed upon contract. His “tough times” bear striking resemblance to our modern, and undeniably tough, times, a likeness demonstrated by his statement: “We have a lot of food shortages and food waste. There is a disconnect between the farmers producing the food and then getting it to market and to the people.” To cope with his predicament, Kenyan farmer Noah Nasiali-Kadima founded a Facebook group in order to get advice (and consolation, perhaps) from other farmers in the region. His group effectively engages nearby farmers in sharing their successes and failures, teaching and learning from one another. And like Nasiali-Kadima found, farmers have a lot to offer; involving farmers in larger decision-making and policy conversations in the food industry is an important, timeless remedy.
Though previous calls for revolution in the food system have not been heeded, the coronavirus has left some stakeholders hopeful that change will finally come, thanks to the magnitude and visibility of this dramatic, systemic shock. As the food stamp program was a product of the Great Depression, perhaps the rising number—having risen by 71% since the onset of the coronavirus—of Americans reliant on food stamps will see aid in the form of a revolutionized food supply chain. Changes could even begin with steps as small as installing more fridges in food bank warehouses, standardizing expiration dates, or asking farmers what they need or think is needed in this situation.
