Food in the Time of Coronavirus

I lean my body down into a vast container of Toasted O’s, inhaling wheat dust as I scoop out a couple servings of starchy breakfast cereal – it's impossible not to cough. It’s a Friday morning in early April, and the coronavirus is hitting the American South hard. When I arrive at the local food bank in my quarantine home of Tennessee, I’m asked to fill out a form declaring if I have been to China, Iran, or Italy, in the last fourteen days. But at this point, the invisible spores of coronavirus are not an enemy that comes from foreign lands but has morphed into an American kryptonite – targeting political divisions to exploit the nation’s weak health. As my fellow food bank volunteers and I walk into the ‘clean room’ where open containers of food sit ready to be packed for thousands of families, no masks are offered, and no social distancing procedures are in place. The possibility of coronavirus being coughed into the food of thousands of vulnerable families, and no one doing anything about it. Welcome to the state of food in America.

Later that day, after I’ve showered off the remnants of Toasted O’s, I’m on the phone with the team at Kawadah Farms, the local business I’ve partnered with in Liberia to produce and sell nutritious low-cost food for the last two years. The Liberian government has shut down all in-country movement, including of people transporting food from agricultural areas to the capital city where most of the population lives. How will Kawadah get the crops from farmers to produce the products? And get it to frantic consumers who are told to stay at home, in homes with no food reserves to speak of mere inches from their neighbors? We decide to change our sales strategy to keep market vendors safe, and lean on the personal relationships we have built with farmers over the years to try to obtain a consistent supplies of crops. Answering these questions for Kawadah Farms has never been more important, as the imported food Liberia relies on, rice from India, processed food from Europe, donated soy and corn from the US, is drying up. It is not coronavirus that keeps Liberians up at night, but the starvation that will come as a result of coronavirus.

Our global food system is broken. There are a couple giant companies who pump processed foods into the bellies of my Tennessee neighbors and Liberian coworkers. We have an agriculture system that has emphasized cash crops in countries like Liberia to such a degree that farming families are often no longer growing their own food. It’s better for a farmer to grow palm oil, or cocoa, or coffee, claims the leading international development agencies. With those increased incomes, farming families can then go to a market and purchase imported food, their only option when all the other farmers in their community are also supplying cash crops to the world market – when no one is left growing crops for domestic consumption. As reported in the New York Times and elsewhere this week, coronavirus will lead to 130 million new people on the brink of starvation in the world, on top of the existing 135 million of those who already close to starvation globally. What has transpired over the last 3 months is an unprecedented reminder that the way our world eats is not working.

In this time of absolute chaos, we are faced with an opportunity. The faults of food in its current form have led to a malnutrition earthquake. And out of the wreckage businesses like Kawadah Farms push to persevere, proving what’s possible when food can be local, nutritious, delicious, and affordable for those living in poverty. Deep in the food systems trenches the last five years in the US, Liberia, China and Congo, I have learned it is possible to build food systems that emphasize nutrition and deliciousness, local manufacturing and radical affordability. In this moment of global pandemic, an understanding that we can build better systems gives me a great deal of hope. Local manufacturing that is resilient to international trade shocks, nutrition that give children the strength their brains need to flourish, and a business model that allows local business to keep food supplies consistent even when the world around it shuts down.

It is in times of destruction that new paradigms have the space to emerge. Now is one of those rare moments. That is why I’ve founded Tailored Food, a social impact consultancy working with small-scale entrepreneurs and large nonprofits and companies to build food systems that emphasize nutritious, delicious, affordable, local food.

The goal is that when the Toasted O dust settles post-coronavirus, we live in a world where all of us, whether in the American South or rural Congo, can feed our families what we need to thrive.