supporting
family farms
is
More Important Than Ever
By Zen Honeycutt
Founding Executive Director
of Moms Across America (MAA)
The horror scenes plague social media. Consumers are horrified to see millions of pounds of perfectly good food, tomatoes, onions and squash being dumped to rot, discarded because of the CoVid 19 shutdown. We are outraged. Can’t this food be donated?
Can’t buyers be found? Thousands of people who need food are flooding the food banks, so why is this food being wasted?
Most consumers, and likely politicians, do not understand the impact to farmers and brands of the loss of orders from restaurants and schools. They don’t understand the 3-day window for ripe produce, during which time the produce must be available to the consumer.
They don’t understand the problem that the lack of additional local distribution presents. One cannot simply snap one’s fingers and find 100,00 buyers for 200,000 tomatoes within 3 days...or can we?
What if this time of economic shutdown, of crisis, was seen as the Chinese see it? The word “crisis” in Chinese is a combination of the symbols of “danger” and “opportunity”. What if we saw the danger of the collapse of our food system as an opportunity for creativity, resourcefulness and individual empowerment that leads to stronger communities?
Now is the time for stepping up, creating more local consumer to farmer connections and strengthening our society.
We could take inspiration from Japan when a crisis of trust hit the grocery store shelves in 1955 when arsenic in Morinaga dried milk poisoned thousands and resulted in the death of over 100 infants.