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For many Americans, grocery shopping has become an intensely stressful experience. To maintain social distancing, people must queue before entering stores. Once inside, they must scramble to find increasingly scarce products, including household staples from milk and eggs to pork and beef. Others can no longer afford to go to grocery stores. Instead, they wait for hours to get goods from food banks that are also running short on supplies.
But in a seeming paradox, farmers are destroying their products — including many of the same goods that stores lack. Dairy Farmers of America, the country's biggest dairy co-op, has called many of its members and instructed them to dump their milk. The cooperative has estimated that farmers are now dumping up to 3.7 million gallons of milk per day. Sanderson Farms, a chicken processor, smashes 750,000 eggs each week. Farmers have been plowing their produce into the ground.
Comment: All it takes is one major crisis to reveal the inadequacy of our decrepit systems of distribution. It's ironic that the massive, highly specialized monopolies are the ones failing while the diversified small-scale operations are having to adjust to increased demand. It could end up that an unintended consequence of the lockdown is that the future may be a whole lot greener.
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