Before government shut the nation down, Americans ate half their meals outside home. The farmers who served restaurants and cafeterias are dumping meat, veggies, and milk. And it's going to get worse. //

America’s food system is cracking.

People are still eating, farmers are still farming, and grocery stores are still open, but in areas around the country, shoppers looking for meat, milk, and other products find empty shelves and limits on what they can purchase — all while farmers from coast to coast are forced to dump milk, plow up vegetables, and euthanize livestock. So what’s happening, and why?

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. //

While in the mid-1980s, Americans still spent the majority of their food budget at retail grocery stores, that number has steadily declined, and in 2010, eating-out spending surpassed at-home for the first time. At the opening of 2020, Rieley estimates, only “40 percent of what farmers produced may have gone into retail.”

“Prior to [coronavirus], the majority of Americans would eat at least half of their meals away from home. A lot of people eating lunch and dinner away from home, or breakfast and lunch, and then you go out to dinner on the weekends, so all that production was geared toward food service, which is generally speaking a different size of animal, a different size of chicken.” //

Fast food does “70 percent of their business out the drive-up window,” Quality Milk Sales group CFO/COO Rance Miles tells The Federalist. “Of course, the drive-up window is still open, but places like McDonald’s, their total sales are down 30 percent; when you take a place like Subway, their sales are down 40 percent. I think it’s a combination that you say, ‘Well, we have this equipment that will do nuggets and strips, but that’s not what people are buying right now — they want chicken in the grocery store and we don’t have enough capacity for that. We have plenty of poultry, we just don’t have enough capacity. And then maybe some of that capacity we do have is shut down because of Covid cases.'”

“If this is going to be the new normal forever, they would go ahead and make the changes and everything would be fine eventually,” Rieley says, “but because the governors keep saying, ‘Two more weeks, just two more weeks, just two more weeks.’ They’re not going to put the investment into retooling the plants and then just have to change it back.”