Grace Worwa – Opinion Columnist

In last week’s issue, we discussed the lamb’s tragic disappearance from our beloved Friday gyros. But Gusties, lamb is not the only Caf casualty of the COVID-19, just as the meat processing bottleneck is not the only COVID-induced disruption in the food supply chains. As it turns out, the pandemic exposed frightening vulnerabilities that already existed within agricultural food systems, resulting in staple Gustie foods missing from the Caf.
Among those foods are veggie and chicken eggrolls, veggie spring rolls, and chicken potstickers. According to Dining Service Purchasing Manager Shari Jacobson, the lack of eggrolls is the most mind-boggling.
“I have not been able to order either brand that we normally stock, nor any sub-brand of either of those two varieties since before Christmas break,” Jacobson said.
To replace the eggrolls, Jacobson has stocked up cheese wontons and pork egg rolls instead.
Our supply issues in the Caf reflect the challenges facing food processors and manufacturers across the state. According to a survey conducted collaboratively by Minnesota food and agricultural groups, 56 percent of these businesses experienced a decline in revenue after June 29, 2020. They also faced major disruptions due to the pandemic, including market and sales losses, labor shortages, lack of PPE, bottlenecks, and more.
The reason for this? Minnesota’s agricultural food system is not built to withstand such catastrophe. Processing and manufacturing are monopolized under large, international companies, leaving consumers with nowhere else to turn when those companies fall short.
Meatpacking is an excellent example of this. According to Dr. Kathy Draeger, over 90 percent of the meat packing industry in Minnesota is owned by four international companies. Dr. Draeger is the Statewide Director of the University of Minnesota Regional Sustainable Development Partnerships, and she’s been calling this a problem for years.
And she was right.
The suffering in Minnesota’s hog industry this year supports her claim. Due to monopolization, ten plants handle about 85 percent of all pigs raised in Minnesota, according to the MinnPost. When many of these plants shut down due to COVID, farmers had nowhere to take their pigs. As a result, the Minnesota Pork Board “estimated more than 450,000 hogs were put down in Iowa and Minnesota” (MinnPost).
Beyond lack of processing space, monopolization by large, international companies also means exposure to global market shifts, and that comes with its own set of problems.
According to Yahoo Finance, “The crisis in the global food market owes to a glut in supply in some regions that cannot reach growing demand in others.”
In other words, when a supply center in one part of the world suddenly runs short on product, other parts of the world experiencing a rise in demand are left starved.
For example, early-pandemic shortages in grain-producing countries caused them to restrict grain exports (Yahoo Finance); however, this meant that countries like China could not obtain grain to satisfy their rising demand. As a result, the World Banks says that food prices increased by almost 20 percent last year.
“Our food system is fragile and we need to have plan A’s and plan B’s because we can’t just keep getting bigger industrially, with one globalized company owning such a huge percentage,” Dr. Draeger said. “We need to have multiple strategies.”
Here at Gustavus, we felt the consequences of the monopolized food system in the Caf, especially at the beginning of the pandemic.
“Typically, I place an order and there might be three items that are out-of-stock, so I’ll get substitutes or say I don’t need it, but [last spring], I remember placing orders and there would be like 30 items out-of-stock,” Jacobson said. “It was unbelievable. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Thankfully, things have cooled down quite a bit since then, but it still remains difficult to get several food items that are normally readily available, like the chicken and veggie egg rolls.
“It’s like the toilet paper thing all over again,” Jacobson said, ”Where you go to the store one time and they don’t have any toilet paper, so the next time you go and they do, everyone is trying to buy 18 big packs of toilet paper and then [the stores are] out again.”
Thanks to the pandemic, the dangers of our monopolized food system are finally being acknowledged at the state government level.
According to MinnPost, “the MDA (Minnesota Department of Agriculture) has already worked to help smaller meat processors expand or open more quickly.”
New proposals are expected to quickly follow as to how to continue expanding small meat processing.
In the meantime, we may mourn some of our missing caf favorites, but now we know that we are not alone.