While food banks are having trouble supplying enough food for those who need it, farmers are dumping food they can't sell. That's because some of the biggest food buyers — chain restaurants, schools — are gone, and supply chains are struggling to adapt.
"We cannot pick the produce if we cannot sell it, because we cannot afford the payroll every week," says Kim Jamerson, a vegetable grower near Fort Myers. Those crops will be plowed back into the ground."We'll have to tear 'em up," Jamerson says."Just tear up beautiful vegetables that really could go elsewhere, to food banks, and hospitals, and rest homes."
Normally, chain restaurants buy a steady supply of produce, week after week. But most have shut down — just as Florida's vegetable harvest shifted into high gear."Now you're sitting there with all this production, perfect weather, and everybody's like, 'Oh no,'" Johnson says. Something similar has happened to dairy farmers. Milk sales in supermarkets have increased, but not enough to make up for the drop in sales of milk to schools, and cheese to Pizza Hut. Factories that make milk powder can't take any more milk. So some milk cooperatives have told their farmers to dump the milk that their cows are producing.
Meanwhile, food banks and pantries are having trouble supplying enough food to people who need it, including millions of children who no longer are getting free meals at school, and people who've lost jobs in recent weeks., CEO of Feeding America, a network of food banks and charitable meals programs, says that these programs normally receive large donations of unsold food from retail stores.
Kim Jamerson thinks"it's just a shame" to have enough food, but not be able to get it to the people in need."A woman who's got two kids, how can she live on unemployment, go into a grocery store and pay 90 cents for a cucumber? She just can't do that."
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