> The retail food chain links one set of farmers to grocery stores, and a second chain links a different set of farmers to institutional purchasers of food, such as restaurants, schools, and corporate offices. With the shutting down of much of the economy, as Americans stay home, this second food chain has essentially collapsed. But because of the way the industry has developed over the past several decades, it’s virtually impossible to reroute food normally sold in bulk to institutions to the retail outlets now clamoring for it. There’s still plenty of food coming from American farms, but no easy way to get it where it’s needed.
Pollan identifies the representative problem:
> One chicken farmer interviewed recently in Washington Monthly, who sells millions of eggs into the liquified egg market, destined for omelets in school cafeterias, lacks the grading equipment and packaging (not to mention the contacts or contracts) to sell his eggs in the retail marketplace.
But the article then goes on to attack all of Pollan's usual bugbears: mergers, globalization, corn, and soybeans. Which have nothing to do with the problem he posed.
He claims:
> Local food systems have proved surprisingly resilient. Small, diversified farmers who supply restaurants have had an easier time finding new markets...
But, frankly, citation needed. Small farmers can't just call up their local supermarket and say "hey can you take a field's worth of arugula off my hands? No sorry I don't have any way of packaging it into retail portions, I've always sold in food-service size bags to restaurants."
And for cities of a certain size, "buying local" is an impossibility anyways. I live in New York City. The land required to feed us would stretch hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of miles around... where there are already smaller towns and suburbs that mostly fill the space. Which is why we source our food from all over the country and world.
So unfortunately, this article completely fails to find the sickness or cure.
>Small farmers can't just call up their local supermarket and say "hey can you take a field's worth of arugula off my hands? No sorry I don't have any way of packaging it into retail portions, I've always sold in food-service size bags to restaurants."
Speaking as someone who has done buying for both supermarket chains and smaller independent stores for about a decade: they absolutely can. Maybe not to Safeway/your local Kroger-owned chain, but certainly to everyone smaller than that: large regional chains like New Seasons Market in the PNW, smaller chains like Bi-Rite in SF and Berkeley Bowl -- in other words, they still have a good chance with roughly 40% of the grocery retail market. And when I would get a call like this, I nearly always converted.
Also, produce doesn't generally need to be packaged into retail ready portions -- that's hardly a problem most of the time. Maintaining availability and quality, managing inventory and buying, and keeping prices computerized and margins reasonable are much harder problems, particularly with produce, and having a direct relationship with a small producer who can be more flexible than a larger distributor can address many of those.
This! There's a Korean grocery store chain around here (Zion) that brings in all kinds of produce and the majority of it is significantly less than anywhere else local. Some of it is near it's expiration date, so due diligence is required, but at other times I think stuff is incredibly affordable because it's in season and there's a ton of supply. I've seen prices for some things hit ten cents a pound.
> This! There's a Korean grocery store chain around here (Zion) that brings in all kinds of produce and the majority of it is significantly less than anywhere else local. Some of it is near it's expiration date, so due diligence is required...
That's a workable model, provided very strict guidelines are put into place, temp controlled and freezing before expiration date etc... It just makes sense to do that than let it go to a dumpster and landfill given all the hidden costs it takes to raise animals for meat.
> but at other times I think stuff is incredibly affordable because it's in season and there's a ton of supply.
It is. That's the added benefit to seasonal menus in restaurants, it helps re-direct the supply to value added models, but also creates a direct benefit to the consumer.
> I've seen prices for some things hit ten cents a pound.
This is a bit hard to believe, nothing that requires any amount of labour to grow can realistically be sold that low and not be done at a loss for all involved.
I mean even growing herbs requires resources, labour, transport that require a higher price. Even if Ag went entirely automated I doubt we'd see that price for anything remotely called 'food.'
Perhaps a promotion to get people in the doors? That's typical in grocery stores business models.
I think the extremely low prices are mostly for fallow crops like daikon, but I've also seen navel oranges close to it at 8lbs for a dollar, albeit infrequently, which is probably oversupply from some other seller.
I'll also see rotten/moldy berries I wouldn't pay a penny for, so it's very YMMV.
Edit - The least expensive produce right now is celery at 20 cents pretty pound.
> Edit - The least expensive produce right now is celery at 20 cents pretty pound.
That's insanity, celery has a 90+ growing period [1] but if they can make it work for them. its just the water used and the labor for harvest is worth way more than that. And highlights my issue with Farm subsidies, I can't imagine what the farmer was paid.
I've been to many Asian stores (private to chains) having grown up in SoCal and raised on Cantonese cuisine, and I can't remember seeing something that low ever in even a 99 Ranch, Mitsuwa, Marukai or Hmart, let alone a private place with higher operational costs and overhead.
Then again, most would ruin their reputations if they tried selling rotten berries as SoCal, all of California really, is a pretty well reviewed and subject to backlash in Print media back then and now Social media and yelp and the like.
> One chicken farmer interviewed recently in Washington Monthly, who sells millions of eggs into the liquified egg market, destined for omelets in school cafeterias, lacks the grading equipment and packaging (not to mention the contacts or contracts) to sell his eggs in the retail marketplace.
Also worth noting that none of those impediments matter to a hungry consumer; if the farmer trucked the eggs in and sold them on the sidewalk there'd be buyers. It is entirely possible that the reason the commercial food chain has collapsed is it is straight-up illegal to sell the food directly to consumers, so it gets destroyed.
Farmers are not the sort of people who encounter a minor difficulty then think "welp, I'm just gonna destroy my produce, that seems like the best option". If that is what they are doing then there are some mighty impediments in their path.
> Also worth noting that none of those impediments matter to a hungry consumer; if the farmer trucked the eggs in and sold them on the sidewalk there'd be buyers. It is entirely possible that the reason the commercial food chain has collapsed is it is straight-up illegal to sell the food directly to consumers, so it gets destroyed.
Not true, their are models that allow for that with many caveats (Rawsome in California comes to mind), but you can buy shares in a Farm via a CSA that entitles you to the harvest. Its just that most farms are so large and understaffed that his cannot be done. Moreover, they're incentivized not to do so (see below).
> Farmers are not the sort of people who encounter a minor difficulty then think "welp, I'm just gonna destroy my produce, that seems like the best option". If that is what they are doing then there are some mighty impediments in their path.
Having been a farmer myself, apprentice and then Manager, I agree with your sentiment. The problem you seem to be negating is that crop insurance and livestock insurance via Ag subsidies are masking these culling(s) that turn losses into compensated (albeit low) actions.
Its a horrible system that leads to these things, its baked into the system and its not just in the US and Europe, its everywhere. That's how this system is in just about every country with a semblance of a 'stable government' in the World, including the developed World.
> Farmers are not the sort of people who encounter a minor difficulty then think "welp, I'm just gonna destroy my produce, that seems like the best option". If that is what they are doing then there are some mighty impediments in their path.
I agree for the most part, especially with what's happening now. On the flip side, there are times when farmers do destroy produce to manage supply and stabilize prices.
Vaguely related. I'm a truck driver. I recently drove a 53 foot trailer full of Campbell's tomato soup from Findlay OH to a grocery distributor in Brooklyn.
Tangent warning:
There's actually a large amount of produce for NYC that is grown locally. Leaving aside the Union Square Greenmarket which gets produce from as far away as Buffalo, most of the Greenmarkets have farms coming up from long island, upstate ny, new jersey and PA. And there's a small subset which is actually grown in NYC (the first time I saw the chickens in Harlem was quite confusing).
> And for cities of a certain size, "buying local" is an impossibility anyways. I live in New York City. The land required to feed us would stretch hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of miles around... where there are already smaller towns and suburbs that mostly fill the space. Which is why we source our food from all over the country and world.
I’m also in the city and there are plenty of neighborhood CSAs always looking for new members. When the pandemic hit I found Chef Collective [1] which previously was supplying restaurants and was quickly able to switch to home delivery within a week or two of their commercial supply chain being disrupted.
Sure, we’re not going to get, say, local couscous and olive oil. But there is certainly a lot of local farmland that can feed the city.
> Which have nothing to do with the problem he posed.
The problem is that he touches the details while avoiding the big problem: capitalism.
Or, possibly more appropriately, capitalism that marches toward absolutely, positively maximum profit with no regard to any other concept.
This is the paperclip maximizer problem but on a smaller scale.
And this affects everything, not just food. It's why we had such a disaster about medical equipment--manufacture it where we can extract the last penny vs. manufacturing locally to increase resiliency.
The discussion needs to be "How do we inject some inefficiency into capitalism in order to get some other benefits?"--resiliency, local employment, consumer responsiveness, etc. are all things to consider.
Up until Covid-19, nobody cared even the slightest iota about anything other than pure, unadulterated profit.
Sure it is. It is more profitable to sell to a middleman who then sells to the grocery store chains because of volume. If you only sell to consumers, then the amount of food you can sell is significantly lower unless you put together your own nationwide distribution network.
Why haven't these companies reconfigured to switch chains? They CAN do this. It is a matter of time and money to do so, and they would clean up after doing so.
The problem is that everybody is assuming that we will be going back to normal in about 6 months, so anything at that time scale or longer is wasted money from the point of view of profit. Nobody will reoptimize anything until they are absolutely FORCED to as part of an existential threat.
This is all about optimizing for profit at the expense of anything else.
The underlying theory in your post seems to be that it is more profitable to not sell something than to sell something due to economies of scale.
That doesn't pass a basic sanity check when applied to food. It is much more likely something else is the problem rather than that farmers are allowed to maximise their profits.
I do agree with a basic premise that there needs to be a focus on redundancy and resiliency and that the lack thereof is a major problem. But the assumption that it doesn't make on-the-face-of-it sense for farmers to sell their produce directly to customers is in need of supporting evidence.
> The underlying theory in your post seems to be that it is more profitable to not sell something than to sell something due to economies of scale.
> That doesn't pass a basic sanity check when applied to food. It is much more likely something else is the problem rather than that farmers are allowed to maximise their profits.
Why? The consumer isn't coming to you. You have to go to the consumer.
That implies that I, as the farmer, have to pick the food, box the food, transport the food, store some amount of food where the consumer is, remove the bad food daily, etc.
I can spend 6 months setting that all up for it to become effectively useless if the supply chain all turns back on. It's a big drag on cash reserves at a critical point: maybe I want to do that setup, but maybe I should wait until after September when we see what schools are doing.
I also think that you believe that most farmers in the country are mom and pop working a couple acres. That isn't true anymore. Farms have scaled and consolidated like anything else.
Your theory is that they make more money destroying products than they would selling to another chain. That’s a pretty extraordinary claim that would require some evidence.
Remember, the capitalist nature that you are deriding means that the farmers want to, you know, make money. Why would they intentionally destroy their product if selling to customers at absolutely any price above $0 was an option?
> Capitalism is not the thing preventing farmers from easily selling this stuff directly to consumers.
> Sure it is.
I think its exactly because Free Market Capitalism doesn't exist in the gatekeeping process we currently call the 'The Market' that makes selling directly to consumers an anomaly rather than standard and is quite contrary to your argument.
You have to setup a share system to try and have a chance to lower your overheard and CapEX with a farm. Even Farmer's Markets are tightly regulated in some States, and they force you to accept SNAP/Food Stamps to be admitted into the program that allows you to rent a spot for a season. Which presents a whole other set of issues to be paid for your goods/services.
There is nothing about Free Market Capitalism in that. And your complex supply chain system is the symptom and byproduct of that perversion.
> Why haven't these companies reconfigured to switch chains? They CAN do this. It is a matter of time and money to do so, and they would clean up after doing so.
Because since the late 80-90s there has been a systematic eradication of small farms in the US by large Chemical and Biotech Multi-nationals; its a lot harder to petition Monsanto (now Bayer) to stop doing the things that have made them trillions in profits than it would a small and pop 15 acre operation and adapt to this model. I highly recommend this book written by a local journalist in Boulder, CO, called Harvest of Rage [1], and he talks about the cascade effects of ruining rural America as the food belt became the rust belt and led to extremism.
> The problem is that everybody is assuming that we will be going back to normal in about 6 months, so anything at that time scale or longer is wasted money from the point of view of profit. Nobody will reoptimize anything until they are absolutely FORCED to as part of an existential threat.
I disagree, I'm currently in discussion for a position with a startup that is going even further to capture the food loss from this kind of myopic short sighted-ness, I hope I get it as it would be a good project to really sink my teeth into.
> This is all about optimizing for profit at the expense of anything else.
Agreed. But that doesn't mean we cannot include a value system in that narrative that helps find a middle ground. We have to be flexible and understand things won't happen over night, I've been trying to tackle this very issue for nearly 15 years, hence my background. And while I always want to see more progress I cannot deny we've come a long way, especially since I was a 90s kid in the US and we didn't even know we were eating pesticide leaden vegetables: we were lab rats!
Its no surprise my generation continues to have all these food-bourne illnesses like obesity, diabetes and heart disease. So rather than opine of what should be, try to make a difference in your community. Start a community garden program and plant fruit trees around your area. This was typical during WWII and should come back in my opinion. Now that people are now able to go outside.
> Pure free market capitalism is a dream that can never exist in reality. It's not politically feasible.
Darknet Markets?
Also as a sidenote, here is the updated 'New Harvest of Rage' [1] article that predicted, among others, that Trump's election would lead to this vast polarization and eventually these protests and riots we saw this year back in 2016.
Far more workers suffered far more terribly when the workers at steel mills, coal mines, car manufacturers, etc. all got shafted at the hands of Reagan in order for the oligarchs to bust up unions.
And all of these "good, salt-of-the-earth folk" CHEEREDREAGANON. Such a terrible shame to see these people now sliced and diced by the sword that they were happy to see used on others.
"Harvest of Rage" is trying to excuse a bunch of bigoted idiots who aren't smart enough to figure out that maybe ... just maybe ... they have more in common with the poor city dwellers than the billionaire oligarchs.
This is not new. Quoting LBJ: "If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you."
Thoughts and prayers, red state land. Thoughts and prayers.
> Sorry, I don't buy the "Harvest of Rage" thesis.
You don't have to, but having seen in it with my own eyes I can tell you its real.
> Far more workers suffered far more terribly when the workers at steel mills, coal mines, car manufacturers, etc. all got shafted at the hands of Reagan in order for the oligarchs to bust up unions.
This isn't about whataboutism, those are all symptoms of the disease that occurs when Free Markets aren't allowed to introduce direct competition to the established players ecosystem; I can say right now having been in the Auto Industry and a car enthusiast my whole Life that Japan's dominance was already well established by the late 50s, some of it complicit with US Industry in Post-WWII Japan--I highly recommend the book Martin Bormann: Nazi in exile to see how deep Industry was in the latter years of WWII and how it led the rise of the rise of many Auto manufactures.
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries is the most obvious case, one that led to DSM partnership (as was Daimler-Benz and things like Operation Paperclip and staffing NASA scientists with ex Nazi/SS, but I won't go into that), that made Japanese car manufactures displace the stagnant and quite frankly obsolete designs and engineering of US manufactures. The same goes for Nissan, BMW, VW etc...
Unions are exactly what made US manufactures obsolete and complacent, and the fact that the big 3 still had them up until 2008 is partly what sent them into bankruptcy and required bail outs. There were people on payroll who paid to not show up to work, that's what a Union can do, whereas a properly Free Market rewards based on merit and quantifiable, valuable input to an organization. Granted its not perfect, but its way more effective than what made US manufactures obsolete. Tesla's story is worth noting as it's turmoil as a small car startup, with a privately funded tech based ethos, was near bankruptcy; it took the loan/bailout like the GM and Chrysler, and then paid it back with interests. And still wasn't allowed to enter many Markets because they refused to adopt the Dealership model. Very interesting worth following up on.
I cannot speak about mining or steal mills, as I wasn't even born when most of those things were pretty much gone and outsourced to China.
> "Harvest of Rage" is trying to excuse a bunch of bigoted idiots who aren't smart enough to figure out that maybe ... just maybe ... they have more in common with the poor city dwellers than the billionaire oligarchs.
That may be true, but that's not the only take away, it lineouts how its those very same oligarchs (Dupont, Monsanto/Bayer, Eli Lilly et al) are the ones that systemically took their way of life in Rural America that was based on Agriculture based lifestyles and displaced them. Its not surprise these very same regions are the ones hardest hit by the Opioid Crises, either; I'd argue they were creating their demographic in a multi-phase strategy. And again, all done with State approval.
> Quoting LBJ...
Very insightful, but only further proves the notion that Unions and even racial tensions are not much different than they are today and instead we have enabled them to dictate the terms to its populace through Lobbyists and favorable legislation, which is like the Precursor to every Cyberpunk MegaCorp-ruled dystopia.
Its also telling how much more 'American' made Japanese manufactures are in comparison to its US counterpart, many of which are made in Mexico and Central America.
> The retail food chain links one set of farmers to grocery stores, and a second chain links a different set of farmers to institutional purchasers of food, such as restaurants, schools, and corporate offices. With the shutting down of much of the economy, as Americans stay home, this second food chain has essentially collapsed. But because of the way the industry has developed over the past several decades, it’s virtually impossible to reroute food normally sold in bulk to institutions to the retail outlets now clamoring for it. There’s still plenty of food coming from American farms, but no easy way to get it where it’s needed.
Pollan identifies the representative problem:
> One chicken farmer interviewed recently in Washington Monthly, who sells millions of eggs into the liquified egg market, destined for omelets in school cafeterias, lacks the grading equipment and packaging (not to mention the contacts or contracts) to sell his eggs in the retail marketplace.
But the article then goes on to attack all of Pollan's usual bugbears: mergers, globalization, corn, and soybeans. Which have nothing to do with the problem he posed.
He claims:
> Local food systems have proved surprisingly resilient. Small, diversified farmers who supply restaurants have had an easier time finding new markets...
But, frankly, citation needed. Small farmers can't just call up their local supermarket and say "hey can you take a field's worth of arugula off my hands? No sorry I don't have any way of packaging it into retail portions, I've always sold in food-service size bags to restaurants."
And for cities of a certain size, "buying local" is an impossibility anyways. I live in New York City. The land required to feed us would stretch hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of miles around... where there are already smaller towns and suburbs that mostly fill the space. Which is why we source our food from all over the country and world.
So unfortunately, this article completely fails to find the sickness or cure.