Learning from our food system during Covid-19
Focusing on food
In a time of Covid-19, global lockdowns, restrictions on movements, business closure, and mass death by the pandemic, the food system is at the fore of people’s minds, alongside the health and economic systems around the world. We’ve seen the importance of population health and its role in a stable economy and we’ve seen a global response to a common threat. Covid-19 also illuminates our tenuous connection to our food system and how that system is linked to our health and economic systems.
Writing about this is a jelly fish of a beast. Many tentacles, different threads and stings evolve daily, as new light is cast on the virus and stories and insights come out. Over the last month I’ve pondered how so much of what is happening right now is affecting our food system and affected by it. In this Digest I seek to try and pull those thoughts together to see what answers our food system holds for us during this time and what questions it stirs up. I’m feeling foolish at times to try and capture something that is so unknown and moving so fast, and at other times it feels so important to have this record as the sands shift that I can’t stop writing.
This piece covers impacts that are international, including how this crisis is contributing to global famine, and nationally what it means for our food businesses in New Zealand, the real struggle people are having to feed themselves, and how for some, Covid-19 has them reconsidering their own way of living and eating, potentially strengthening our local food systems. I also lay down a challenge to every single one of you to commit to making a change in your sphere of influence that improves our food system after Covid-19.
The bigger picture
The importance of the food system in times of disaster is not new. Right now, people are starving due to war, famine, poor distribution, state control, and climatic changes like storms, droughts, ice melt, and floods affecting harvests and leading to crop failures, particularly bad for self sufficient farmers.[1] It may come as a surprise to some of you that 80% of the farmers in the world are small holders and live on subsistence and small scale farming.[2] But for the first time, in a long time, simultaneously no matter where you live or how you live, the food system is on your mind due to Covid-19.
Our food system is undergoing big shifts as the global food supply bends and shakes with the impacts of this beast of a pandemic. Millions globally are affected by this virus. During March and April 2020 one third of our global population lives under some form of restriction, self isolating, or in enforced lockdown and quarantine. The future has never felt so uncertain for many with a recession looming and waves of global change hitting everyone.
Understanding the food system
Let us take this time to understand what the food system actually is and also our role in it as citizens, and let’s see as we go through this crisis what lessons we can learn from what is unfolding. I like people to see the full system, to understand it, and then we can see where and how we can make changes.
The food system starts with our environmental system: land, soil, sunlight, and water. Then it’s our growers and farmers producing off the land before raw or primary foods go into manufacturing and production. Across the whole system is a reliance on transportation for distribution, and also the creation of food waste, before food gets to shops or restaurants and cafes for people to eat.[3]
Our food system. Image copyright Spira, 2019. Not to be reused without permission.
Looking at this diagram you will feel that the system is bigger than you and you’re right: we are globally, nationally, and locally interconnected in this system and we are all in it together. And that is why right now we are really in new territory. The true extent of Covid-19 on our food system is not yet known.
Seeing the Syndemic: there are multiple pandemics occurring at the moment that affect our food system
Covid-19 is visible as a pandemic, but currently we also have three ongoing, less visible, pandemics that you may not be aware of: Obesity; Under-nutrition; and Climate Change.[4] The three together form The Global Syndemic, a synergy of pandemics occurring in time and place and affecting each other, as they are all interconnected. Let’s not forget this is the landscape that this immediate and intense pandemic is hitting us. It’s an affronting layer on top of those existing challenges, challenges that represent a broken food system for both health and environmental reasons.
There are four main narratives about why the food system is failing us: the inability of it to feed the future world population; inability to deliver a healthy diet; inability to produce equal and equitable benefits; and the un-sustainability of the system and its impact on the environment.[5]
Globally connected supply chains
With supply chains affected globally now from the pandemic, the need for strengthened local food systems and resilience is more important than ever.
We’re only just beginning to see what the impact of the virus in other countries is going to have for food supply chains here. In time it’s likely more farm workers abroad will be affected and unable to work, unable to supply food ingredients. In countries some distribution will halt, trucks and ships unable to move goods around.
The World Food Programme predicts that Covid-19 will see a quarter of a billion people suffering acute hunger by the end of 2020, calling it a catastrophe, particularly for countries in war zones. The pandemic now hitting countries in Africa and the Middle East could not have come at a worse time for those battling hunger and food insecurity: prior to Covid-19 113 million people were already struggling with acute or severe food insecurity due to existing shocks and crises.
The origin, perhaps
Covid-19 kicked off conversations about the deeper connection between our environmental management and producing and selling food, when it came out that the suspected origin of the virus was from a food market. Covid-19 is tentatively thought to originate in bats and some suspect the virus came from a section of Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market that sold wild animals. The virus origin is still not 100% certain and we may never know. However, questions arose about how viruses travel from wild animals to humans, when those animals are sold in cages to humans for eating and /or medicinal use, at wildlife markets or other cramped cages.
The spotlight shone on this part of China’s food system. China’s wildlife-farming industry was valued at 520 billion Yuan/74 billion USD in 2017. It’s been encouraged to help small scale farmers diversify and grow. Some have argued this is at the expense of biodiversity and deforestation and ultimately of course, now at the expense of human life. Now many of those farmers are struggling and having to cull animals off as China clamps down on the sector and closes wildlife markets a result of the virus.
Impacting New Zealand
Our food businesses and workers
With disaster comes opportunity but it also first brings out what is truly important in society. We need food, shelter, and love. It seems in this time of Covid-19, people think we also need Zoom. Let’s not confuse need with a loose definition of what is now considered essential for society in times of a state of emergency. Online shopping for clothing and alcohol delivery services, for example, blur the ordinary usage of the term with the new Covid-19 definition and have consumers thinking that we need fast fashion to survive. Strip it back. What’s important?
In New Zealand, at a “Level 4” lockdown, what was and was not an “essential service” business became critical for business survival. Those who are essential can continue to operate and serve people, those that are not, can not. Food businesses were carved down the middle, the line not always clear. If you were a retailer you could potentially remain open, with supermarkets exploding in sales and buckling their supply chains. If you were a manufacturer, or producer, likewise, but if you were a food service business like a restaurant or cafe you had to close to restrict human contact and therefore virus spread. Just like that, over night. The hardest hitting news any food truck, or hole in the wall, or bricks and mortar cafe could ever hear with one in five New Zealand hospitality businesses expecting to close following Covid-19.
Many food businesses, especially emerging ones, live hand to mouth and take years to make a profit, or even pay themselves a wage. To be shut for a month means certain death for many due to rent overheads and it remains to be seen how they will fare in the months ahead.
Foodies are there to serve you, please don’t forget it. One thing you can do is buy a voucher for someone to support a local food business when they reopen and play it forward if you can, especially as many have spent lockdown reinventing their business models in order to survive.
Food workers were thrust to the fore, suddenly essential workers. People working in our food system to get us food to eat have always been an important and under valued section of society, with little respect. The pandemic meant a lot of consumers realised for the first time that we need those workers to survive. But were they paid well for the sacrifice they made? Many were exposed to Covid-19 and had to juggle childcare while full time working. For some families that meant they had to rely on the essential workers income and forgo the income of the other person in their family. In the fields, a lot of workers still had to work despite poor conditions and poor pay.
For most farmers in New Zealand it was life as usual: fertiliser companies and milk tankers still running and cows, sheep, and goats still being milked. Growers, although essential services, faced challenges under lockdown conditions. It’s harvest season being autumn in New Zealand, and for many growers it’s a shift, the main hit being if they supplied to restaurants and cafes directly and no where else. Where possible the supply chains bend and they can sell to supermarkets or other food retailers. Some vegetable and fruit growers who supply to vegetable delivery boxes, and organic or local stores, are operating as they usually would, but some who had one supply line into a restaurant that’s shut, had their fruits and produce gone to waste and their income cut. One of the main challenges with that was the closure of many independent grocers.
Feeding people: the real hit to the food system is where it usually breaks — access to food
In recent, affluent times of food abundance, food porn, Instagramming everything you cook, celebrity chefs, global food culture and supply chains, most have not seen anything like this disturbance to the food system or the response people are having to it. That is of course a privileged, relatively white, and wealthy Western experience. Many communities within our communities and countries struggle every day to feed themselves due to a broken food system that does not serve them well. Broken because they cannot access affordable, nutritious and healthy food.
Indigenous cultures continue to suffer the colonial land grabs of centuries past cutting off their right of access to land and growing food how they should be able to — as their ancestors had — feeling the impacts of pollution by industrial colonial powers on waterways and oceans for traditional hunting and fishing.
Yes, every damn day people struggle with the food system. What happened in the past few months is that those who normally pay no attention to that or feel no effects of a broken system were suddenly faced with a visible pandemic that pushed them out of their comfort zone. And straight into the supermarket aisles with multiple trolleys and bills running into the thousands. On the Monday before Lockdown when New Zealand went from Level 2 to Level 3, Countdown supermarkets clocked sales that it estimated would feed 10 million New Zealanders. Yet many people did not eat that day. For some it’s a time to cook gourmet meals and upload pictures to social media, for others it’s how it’s always been, bloody difficult to make ends meet, even worse now that basic commodities are lacking from the supermarket and your job is gone or uncertain.
When you hoard food you contribute to food poverty by taking away the limited access people with less money have to food on the shelf. Clocking up thousands of dollars at the till takes away from the person who has a limited budget a week to feed themselves and their kids.
Supply chains stretched and changed, as people panic bought mass amounts of food, bringing the supermarkets to their knees, urging consumers to calm down and shop normally. The supply chain could cope. Unlike other global crises where supply chains are cut (like storms, hurricanes, civil war, or earthquakes), this pandemic’s closures were at the beck and call of the Government who controlled what was turned on and off for people. That meant food supplies could continue to flow. And what it’s provided for some is therefore a ‘safe’ way to experience a disaster: food, water, electricity, and the internet are still there for a lot of people.
But not for all. One in five New Zealand children live in poverty and don’t have access to affordable, nutritious, and safe food each day.[6] What happens to them now? How will that statistic change in the coming months? To me not accessing food measures one aspect of how our food system is broken. Another is obesity. Another, how we poison our soil and pollute our waterways. How will Covid-19 bend, twist, and snap this already threadbare system? How will it shift the priorities for decision makers and their limited funds? Prior to this we were grappling with how many greenhouse gas emissions there are in different food groups in order to accurately advise people on how to change their diets to save the planet. Will we still care about this after Covid-19?For a long time public health will dominate discussions, policies and actions, potentially at the expense of the environment.
Food banks around the country are seeing an increase in demand for food bags as people feel the financial impact of the virus. Kaibosh and other food rescue agencies continue to operate but like many charities feel the effect of reduced numbers of volunteers (due to limited space and also fear of spreading the virus) and a drop in donations from everyday families who can no longer afford the extra money going out to a charity at this time. Volunteerism and charity models are the scaffolding of the broken access part of our food system. To cope with the scale of the fall out from this will take a lot of work in the coming months, and a lot of financial and in-person support. Here’s our previous Digest post on how you can support those services as a volunteer or donor if that’s an option for you.
We will see new social enterprises or charities emerging to support this part of the system. Already great initiatives like Care-mongering and the services of the Student Volunteer Army are popping up to help with donors and volunteers innovating and problem solving.
Home economics
The outbreak has many people needing to rethink how they shop and eat. Those dependent on takeaways or restaurant food could no longer eat that way. In New Zealand people were forced home for at least a month with families and therefore forced to cook and eat together. People began to stockpile flour and bake sourdough fastidiously. Those who could afford to, that is. Many were left thrown out by a system that they only tenuously were connected to in the first place.
Those who don’t have secure access to food, either by a food desert, or financial desert, are completely disadvantaged by such closures. For many, eating cheap takeaways is the only way to feed their families. Meaning, the only way many people know how to feed their families. A pumpkin and a can of coconut milk for $2.50 could feed a family for dinner, for example, but being forced home to cook when you don’t have pots and pans or any way of knowing how to make food, is a massive problem in itself. We don’t have a food literate population and this crisis will be painfully highlighting that for many households.
There will be positive effects of the masses of people at home learning how to grow, prepare, and cook food, then eat it with their families if people continue to do this once the pandemic is over. A forced diet change from takeaways to cooking know-how will also be positive for health and well-being.
The one-stop shop
Lockdown demonstrated how we are reliant on the main supermarket chains. It showed the power of the internet and delivery services bringing us contactless couriers to the door. Where multiple other smaller food retailers could operate, a more resilient localised system emerged. Waiheke Island for example has one Countdown and one Four Square to serve the island. However, smaller retailers such as Gulf Foods, Plastic Free Pantry, fruit and vegetable shops like Raw, and the Island Grocer, were allowed to continue to operate as retailers, which lead to a more diverse selection of foods for people, particularly for bulk buying. The rest of the country didn’t have these options. During the lockdown, the closure of grocers meant growers have no where to sell their vegetables and fruit with a lack of outlets, also showing the dominance of our supermarket duopoly.
Throughout and after the pandemic we will see an increase in home deliveries and the need to support a more diverse array of food stores than the main supermarkets, in turn supporting our smaller food businesses. Some of these food businesses will sadly also close as a result of not being able to adapt.
Wasted food
People risk contributing to food waste when they over purchase and then dump food or never cook with it because by the time the pandemic is over they haven’t gotten through it all. Instead of living on pasta bake from the stockpiled pasta purchase they go back to buying takeaways and supporting the restaurants and cafes they miss so much. Of course it’s great to support local food! But it’s not good to waste food you’ve bought.
Even a seasoned procurer of food for catering or cooking purposes will still miss an essential ingredient and need to go to the store for something from time to time. Chances are most of those people that spent thousands at the supermarket a couple of weeks back are out of perishables and need to still go and get milk or butter at some point. So what was the point of hoarding that much food? To avoid the supermarket? No, likely to feel power and control at a time when things were turbulent and unknown. There is a lot of underlying psychology associated with hoarding food and mental health conditions which I’m not going into here. But what I will focus on is the creation of food waste from poor meal planning and over purchasing. If you find you have too much food in your storage, please go through and do a stock take, make a meal plan, and if that is not working for your situation, do not throw it out. Donate it to a food bank, church kitchen or other community group cooking to help those in need.
An unintended consequence of over-buying is food waste. Please either eat the food or donate it to those in need before the use-by date kicks in.
How resilient is your home system?
Lockdown has been an opportunity for households to see how reliant we are on a fragile system. What if we were having a disaster like and earthquake or a big storm and supermarkets closed as well as all the other services? How would you cope? At times like these people turn to their garden (or lack of it) for answers and try to desperately sow seeds to grow things, which might not work in winter anyway. So far, fortunately, there has been enough food for everyone, but that could easily not be the case. The sellout of seedlings at plant stores around the country is testament to kiwis deciding that it really is time to get gardening. But like cooking, this takes time, skills and perseverance. At the end of this essay we’ve listed some ideas to help get you started.
To have a resilient home food system is a lot of work and requires a consistent commitment. Following Covid-19 there will be changes in how people work, with more people continuing to work from home if they can, others losing jobs altogether or being forced down to one income. All of these situations give pause to rethink how we are doing things and what we are prioritising. For people with more time and less money investing that time into growing food can provide many benefits.
This situation provides an opportunity for us to pause and reconsider our food system and its resilience. What changes do you need to make to support your household or yourself going forward?
Opportunities for us now
In both our global food system community, and also our nationwide grass roots movements of food resilience here in Aotearoa, many are seeing this as a time for the food system to make it’s move. To stay at the fore of people’s minds, but for the right reasons. As we hurtle towards a quarter of a billion people globally not having access to food and supply chains being hit by climatic events that are still happening despite Covid-19, we need to strengthen our national and local food systems in New Zealand more than ever.
This is a time to put the food system first. To put forward the right food policies that protect people, that help workers have secure rights to living wages when working in agriculture and horticulture and food businesses. To support local growers and strengthen the land tenure system in favour of growing food over urban sprawl or rural demise. To listen to the calm that the environment is feeling at the moment – the birds can hear each other as the traffic has gone, the fish can swim freely without being over taken from the ocean, the rivers breathe again as pollutants don’t wash into them. To rethink how we make, grow and eat our own food in our households and communities. To strengthen our local food system so it’s more resilient and less reliant on a global system that can crash over night.
In order to do this, we need everyone to turn on the light and shine it on their food system and see what changes need to happen. For some of you this is your food business as well as your household, and in this dual role I challenge you to now go and make the preparations and commitments it takes to make change happen. Talk to your business partners, your family members, your flatmates. What can you do to take this pandemic and make changes that are lasting to improve your food system and that of our nations?
For me it’s improving irrigation and soil on our property so we can grow more food for our family; it’s working in my community on Waiheke Island to help us create a local food resilience plan; and it’s working nationally to bring the Food Systems Dialogues to New Zealand this year and make a nationwide shift in our food system.
Will you join me? (See our ideas below).
Emily King
Director, Spira
There are many things you can do to improve your family and community food resilience, here’s our list!
Upskilling through courses such as Permaculture design to understand a design process and think it through with your family and property.
Combining skills with neighbours so that community food growing is a reality, where one or two crops are grown well by certain houses and then swapped.
Know your growers and farmers. Buy from local farmers and growers where you can and support their businesses and in turn your local economy.
Support food businesses that operate in your area.
Visit a farm or orchard near you and understand the realities of that operation for your local farmers and growers
Learning to make your own food and grow your own food where you can.
Work throughout your community to help the most vulnerable have access to food, like The Common Unity Project does.
Teaming up with other families to buy in bulk through a collective can make purchasing food more affordable and reduce packaging
Opening up spaces in the city for people to grow food on vacant lots.
Starting a Crop Swap in your local area
Starting a community fridge in your neighbourhood
Starting or contributing to a local seed bank
Starting or volunteering at a community garden
Starting or volunteering at a food rescue agency
Starting or helping out fruit and vegetable delivery boxes that are affordable for families in your area
Starting or helping out at a soup kitchen, or community meal, is a great way to get to know your neighbours and to help others access food in your area.
Give your food system a voice! Making a community food resilience plan for your neighbourhood or local board area that could lead to a food policy council or local board / council decision making process.
Contact your local council or Councillor and get food on their agenda. Not just soils, or waterways, but the entire food system.
If you need help or ideas on any of these things, please contact us and we will try our best to support you .
References*
*Media articles are hyperlinked in the text, published reports and articles are cited below and footnoted.
[1] OECD (2019). Understanding the Global Food System. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Retrieved from http://www.oecd.org/agriculture/understanding-the-global-food-system/how-we-feed-the-world-today/
[2] Caron, P., Ferrero y de Loma-Osorio, G., Nabarro, D. et al. (2018). Food systems for sustainable development: proposals for a profound four-part transformation.Agronomy for Sustainable Development, August 2018, 38-41. doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13593-018-0519-1
[3] Nguyen, H. (2018). Sustainable Food Systems Concept and Framework. Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, Rome, Italy. Retrieved from http://www.fao.org/3/ca2079en/CA2079EN.pdf
[4] Swinburn, B.A., Kraak, V.I., Allender, S., et. al. (2019). The Global Syndemic of Obesity, Undernutrition, and Climate Change: The Lancet Commission report. Lancet. 393:10173, 791-846.doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(18)32822-8
[5] Béné, C., Oosterveer, P., Lamotte, L., et al. (2019). When food systems meet sustainability – Current narratives and implications for actions. World Development, 113, 116-130. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2018.08.011
[6] Stats NZ Child poverty statistics: Year ended June 2019 (25 February 2020) https://www.stats.govt.nz/news/latest-child-poverty-statistics-released