CityState: Reporter
the food system had begun to industrialize,
the supply chain was nowhere near as
atomized as it is today.
“When you have a really efficient global
food system, it has a certain fragility,” she says.
“When there’s a shock to a highly efficient
system, it’s difficult to be nimble.” Images of
crops plowed under for want of a way to
harvest or market and 1,000-car lines of
hungry Americans at a food distribution
center show “we are seeing the fragility of the
system play out, and we are thinking about
how to mitigate our risk, and out of all of this
create a stronger, more resilient system.”
Rhode Island, which produces 3 percent
of its food needs, cannot do it alone. But
the council is working with its counterparts
in the other New England states to
strengthen the regional food system. In
2014, Food Solutions New England, a network
of advocates for food sustainability,
issued a plan calling for the region to produce
50 percent of its food needs by 2060.
Richman says state partners have begun
talking about trying to speed the timetable,
and how to create state-level policies to
make it happen and to create consistent
consumer demand for local products.
On the ground, Farm Fresh Rhode
Island coped with the practical realities.
As the farmers’ link to retail and wholesale
customers, Farm Fresh has been able to
divert its resources to beefing up retail
sales. Local meat, once a hard sell to institutional
customers, became a hot ticket.
But upstream, farmers were having a hard
time getting their products processed.
“It hit like a big wave. There aren’t a lot
of slaughter houses, and there is a backlog.
So, we have a meat supply chain that shows
the local food system wasn’t ready for the
so many home customers,” says Farm Fresh
co-executive director, Sheri Griffin. “Why
can’t I get a local apple at the local grocery
store? I’ve been working at Farm Fresh for
thirteen years, and the question is still there.
This is so complicated. There’s not one key.
You have to work on whole the system.”
In the state’s eighty-one nursing homes,
COVID-19 waged an all-out assault on the
vulnerable residents, the staff and the financial
foundations of the facilities themselves,
as nursing homes were still untangling the
snarls created by the Unified Health Infrastructure
Project (UHIP). In theory, the
computer software system, launched in
2016, would streamline federal and state
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