The inside of the first Piggly Wiggly, the first "supermarket", from our post on its opening in 1916.
Interesting post from the USDA:
Will COVID-19 Threaten Availability and Affordability of our Food?
The answer, according to the USDA, is almost assuredly no. And I'd further guess that's right.
Not that COVID 19 hasn't revealed some interesting things that experts no doubt already new about the food distribution system in the US, but which most folks, including myself, did not.
For one thing, there isn't a food distribution system per se, but two of them, one for regular home consumption and one for restaurants. That surprised me, but it makes sense in retrospect. The two systems actually have nearly no commonality.
That turns out to be enormously important for the simple reason that it further turns out that 50% of the American food distribution is dedicated to restaurants, which stunned me. But then again, stopping to think about it, a lot of people in our busy modern world eat two meals out of three at restaurants every day without even thinking about it. They probably would even balk at the thought, but they do.
By this I mean the people who stop at McDonalds for an Egg McMuffin, or something similar at some other fast food joint, and then eat lunch out after that. Add to that the large number of Americans who ate out a lot otherwise, if not ate well, up until COVID 19's stay at home orders, and you have 50% of American food being served through restaurants rather than through the home.
And that explains why the boxed beef, vegetables, buns, tortillas, etc. etc. that are served up daily on American plates at restaurants have come to have a different food supply chain. Those places don't go down to Safeway, Ridley's, Smith's Albertson's etc., to pick up their food constituents. And they certainly don't go to Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery.
And as an NPR broadcast I listened to the other day revealed, that chain has been disrupted.
In fact, at least one farming enterprises that are solely in the restaurant food system has decided simply to let its crops stay in the field right now rather than harvest them (they must be located in the south or California where they can presently be harvesting). They're outside the grocery store chain and therefore they're retail customers have quit ordering and the food has no place to go.
And as it has no place to go, people who previously ate two or three meals a day from restaurants are now eating meals at home. Maybe not good meals (although there seems to have been a boom in home cooking), but meals.
And that in fact has created a heightened demand at the grocery store.
So, what's all that tell us?
Well, maybe not much. But maybe it does. Maybe its one of those thing that shows the weakness of the centralized consolidated market systems we've allowed to evolve. I.e., when Walmart started being a grocer, maybe that was a red flag wwe shouldn't have ignored.
There was a time when this didn't work this way. Local restaurants, and they were all local at one time, bought food locally. They pretty much had to, but that doesn't take away from the fact that they did. Where they were high quality restaurants they demanded high quality supplies, and that's not a bad thing either.
That made food, even restaurant food, pretty local, but that's part of the charm, or not, of local food. It was authentic, which might mean authentically great or authentically bland, but it was authentic any way you looked at it.
Now, in fairness, some of this remains. Anyone who has been to the coat and eaten in better restaurants has sampled part of the food chain system that still works the old way. In some localities, although they're rare, aspects of this have been preserved somewhat accidentally by law, as in Hawaii where fish are often sold right off sporting docks to local restaurants. In the west, and in this instance we mean all the way to Northern California, there are some restaurants that have teemed with ranchers for the direct supply of local beef, and even in some areas of the rural West you'll run into this. And one big boom in the local has been the massive return of locally brewed beers.
But on the other hand, when you go to Big Box Burger, or whatever chain, the beef, poultry, lettuce and the like, probably came from somewhere else and from somebody there's no chance that you knew.
And this provides something interesting to muse about from a Distributist prospective. While most economist would certainly argue that our large system favors low food and efficient distribution, normally, if we had a more localized one it might have some really interesting impacts. For one thing, local demand creates a local need to fill it. I.e., if Big Red's Barbecue, or whatever, bought from local suppliers, there'd be a demand for local suppliers, which would likely mean that being a local farmer or rancher, let alone grocer, would be a more attractive and realistic possibility.
We tend not to think of things that way, but it's none the less the case. By going from local grocery stores to super markets, we've wiped out what was once an entire retail profession, grocers, and replaced them with supermarket workers, for the most part. And we've made it harder for a guy to be a local truck farmer as well. Indeed, we've so messed up the dairy industry that it's practically impossible to imagine the way it had once been, with local creameries that supplied milk fro local cows.
And a byproduct of that has been increased urbanization and the evolution of the grocery store owner into the Walmart clerk, and the local dairy farmer into the cubicle worker, who is now at home sheltering in place.
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