Our Food System; Why Is It So Vulnerable To Change?

[Ingomike]

There isn’t a simple answer: No single issue that can be cured by safety gear and precautions, or “phase 1” reopenings. Yes, sick workers in tight conditions are causing a jam-up in processing plants. And yes, a shortage of access to personal protective equipment (PPE) and the threat of employee lawsuits compounds those risks. But the broader problem appears to lie in an unbelievably rapid shift in Americans’ eating habits, and thereby the American food economy, compounded by a draconian reaction and lack of dependable information from elected government.



“You’ve got to remember, it’s a finely tuned system,” John Rieley, a former Sysco food company sales rep and a current councilman for the nation’s top chicken farming county, Sussex Country, Delaware, told The Federalist. That’s usually a good thing — unless you need to play a different note.

Just a few months ago, when more than one-third of us were eating at least one fast food meal a day, Americans wanted tens of millions of chicken nuggets, which are typically made with smaller, three-pound birds, breaded and packaged in large bags for commercial kitchens. When instead we’re buying chicken at the store, we prefer retail packages of larger, five-pound birds, either whole or cut into breasts, legs, or thighs. This is just one example.

While dumping good milk is a grim task, poultry and other livestock are even tougher. At week six, when a 50,000-chicken population is ready to process, the next batch of eggs have hatched, chickens are being raised, and the 50,000 are eating approximately 20,000 pounds of feed a day.

“The egg is laid, it takes 21 days to hatch, six weeks later they take it to their plant and process it, later that day it’s on a truck to the supermarket, you buy it the next day,” Rieley says. “It’s that finely tuned; there’s not a lot of flex in that. Same with pigs: Factories are geared toward their [specific] size, but pigs don’t stop growing.”

https://thefederalist.com/2020/05/14/how-and-why-americas-food-system-is-cracking/

 

[BluePig]

Lean manufacturing all the way around.
Inventory costs $ all the way around and trimming everything down to the bone is business as usual.
Variation costs $ in equipment to process and product going out.
Non-uniform items is like taping $ to the side of product as you ship it out the door.
Not surprised at all.

 

[Farmerjon]

I don't know if it is so much due to "change". The mega slaughter houses are throughout the US. This virus just kicked ass across the US at one time. Then when you have a situation that is unknown if the virus actually came from an animal and if it could transfer back to animal products. Better safe than sorry. Then consider the numbers, anywhere from 10,000 to 30,000 animals slaughtered DAILY. When you shut a plant down for a week, that is a tremendous number of animals that are standing that were supposed to be processed already. So this happens daily those pens don't stay empty long. Thus a big traffic jam so to speak. Thus, that loss of slaughtered animals will eventually show up as reduced product to sell. We shouldn't see people starving due to this, but it will put a damper on the amount available which is something we aren't used to seeing.

 

[Old Dog]

Corporate food system, vertical integration, and unnecessary government over regulation. Small producers and local processors are a thing of the past (due mostly to regulations). When a single facility has to recall a million pounds of ground beef, there is your mega problem. Maybe we have learned from this?

 

[DeadeyeChrista'sdad]

Economies of scale are addictive to the decision makers.

Strategic advantages of decentralized production are lost on them, because all they're thinking about is quarterly profit.

The idea that a foreign power, or even a random germ might disrupt production in one or several of these large facilities and cause a major food shortage is one of the last things on their minds.

As USUAL you and I are NOT members of a great, wealthy, and secure society, as they would have us believe. We're on our own, and we need to learn to buy meat straight from the farmer, and pick it up from the butcher, or butcher it ourselves, as our grandparents did. It's less expensive, the quality is way better, and Chairman Xi has a much harder time fxxking up our lives when we buy locally.

 

[bwframe]

Another part of the vulnerability is that the industry just had an unprecedented change in consumption. Food sales to restaurants (the only place a lot of folks used to get food,) effectively ceased two months ago. There is no switch to flip to change this kind of thing up.

 

[Ingomike]

Another part of the vulnerability is that the industry just had an unprecedented change in consumption. Food sales to restaurants (the only place a lot of folks used to get food,) effectively ceased two months ago. There is no switch to flip to change this kind of thing up.

Did you read the article? That is what it said in much detail...

 

[bwframe]

Sorry, just read what you posted. My apology for stating the obvious.

 

[johntheplinker]

Complete lack of flexibility. Our system has been so stable for so long that it became brittle and inflexible. All it took was what should have been a minor disruption and the whole thing collapsed. There was no contingency plans in place to prepare for anything other than normal operations. If the corona virus didn't cause it, sooner or later something else would have.
Scary thing is, just about every sector of our economy is the same way, just waiting for something to kick off their collapse. And yes, a lot of it is due to lean, just in time, and other corporate initiatives that are great for stock values short term but absolutely suck for long term viability, especially if there is any deviation from the norm.

 

[actaeon277]

Sorry.
I disagree with most on this.
It is not THAT vulnerable.
It's just this economic shutdown caused such a transient.

It's similar to the steel situation before/during/after WWII.
At the beginning of the war, our steel supply was insufficient for the needs of the war.
So we built more mills, many in the middle of the country where it wasn't economical before the war, but were built there during, to minimize the risk due to enemy shelling from sea.
Then the war ended.
And we had a glut of steel.
Some of that went into buildings, skyscrapers, bridges,automobiles, etc.
But not enough.
Steel prices fell, causing Mills to shutdown, contributing to the rising unemployment.

When it was complained about, someone (I forget who) said something about there not being any "accordian" steel mills, able to expand and contract upon demand.


With food.
Raising demand due to population growth, or economic growth is slow enough to expand as needed, with some fluctuations in cost as the price of the change.
Lowering demand due to a population "die off" can be abrupt. BUT those people don't magically appear later as a spike in demand. So there is an initial glut, then farmers plant less, or kill off animals.

But the present situation would be more likened to the great depression.

 

[Crusader17]

All these producers of goods (food, cars, medical supplies, electronics, ammo, anything) work hard to find the maximum efficiency of their operations. I mean you can’t blame them. More efficient means more $$. It just such a wild and sustained change in demand that they can’t adjust quick enough. Just like in August-October in Winchester at Wick’s Pie they ramp up inventory to prepare for the onslaught of pie demand for the holidays. I feel like we all learned that we can’t all ask for the same things and expect it NOW! Of course I’m sure there are those who still don’t get it haha. There was a very good article written about King Arthur Flour and how their demand changed. I think was like a 600% increase. Hahaha that’s RIDICULOUS.
But honestly it’s kinda cool because like Sysco in the federalist article, they did their best to just adapt and keep going.