Pandemics Expose Hidden Cracks in the Food Supply Chain

When the Strawberries Rotted in the Field

In the spring of 2020, dairy farmers in Wisconsin poured thousands of gallons of fresh milk down the drain. In California, fields of ripe lettuce were plowed back into the earth. Meanwhile, grocery store shelves sat empty of eggs, flour, and canned tomatoes. The pandemic had not destroyed the food. It had destroyed the invisible machinery that moves food from the ground to the plate.

This was not a shortage. It was a rupture.

Serpil Aday and Mehmet Seçkin Aday, food scientists at Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University in Turkey, published a review in Food Quality and Safety that mapped exactly where and why the food supply chain cracked under COVID-19 (Aday & Aday, 2020). Their analysis covers the entire journey from farm to consumer, and what it reveals is not a story of scarcity but of brittle systems. The food supply chain, they argue, was not designed for disruption. It was designed for efficiency. And efficiency, it turns out, is fragile.

Why Did Farmers Destroy Food While People Went Hungry?

The paradox of empty shelves and overflowing fields was not a glitch. It was a feature of how modern food chains are built.

Aday and Aday describe a system optimized for just-in-time delivery. Fresh produce, dairy, and meat move from farm to store in days, not weeks. There are no giant warehouses full of backup lettuce. There is no slack. When restaurants, schools, and cafeterias closed overnight, demand vanished for the specific packages and portion sizes that supply chains had been calibrated to deliver. A 50-pound bag of onions destined for a restaurant kitchen cannot be sold to a family buying two onions at a grocery store. The packaging, the distribution route, the buyer all assume a certain shape. When the shape changed, the system seized.

The authors note that labor mobility restrictions hit farms especially hard. Harvesting crops requires human hands, and when borders closed and workers could not travel, the fruit stayed on the vine. Meanwhile, processing plants became outbreak clusters. Meatpacking plants in particular, with their close quarters and cold, humid air, turned into viral transmission sites. The authors document that facility closures created bottlenecks that rippled backward to farmers and forward to consumers.

The result was a brutal mismatch: food rotting at the source while people lined up at food banks.

What Actually Happened to Food Production?

The review covers the entire food chain in four stages: production, processing, distribution, and demand. Each stage broke in its own way.

Production: The Harvest That Never Happened

Farmers faced a triple bind. Labor shortages meant they could not pick crops. Falling prices meant it was not worth harvesting even if they could. And for livestock, processing plant closures meant animals backed up on farms with nowhere to go. The authors report that some poultry producers had to euthanize millions of birds because the slaughterhouses were closed.

Processing: The Factory as Infection Hub

Meatpacking and food processing facilities became the weak link. Aday and Aday highlight that these facilities operate on thin margins and tight schedules. Slowing down for sanitation or social distancing meant losing money. But not slowing down meant workers got sick. The authors recommend that facilities change working conditions and maintain health and safety by altering safety measures, but they acknowledge the tension: safety costs money, and margins are already razor thin.

Distribution: The Truck Driver Bottleneck

Transportation was another hidden crack. The authors note that movement restrictions for workers also applied to truck drivers. Border delays, health checks, and quarantine requirements slowed the movement of food across regions. In normal times, a head of lettuce travels 2,000 miles from farm to plate. In a pandemic, every mile became a risk.

Demand: The Panic Buy That Broke the System

Consumer behavior shifted overnight. People bought pasta, rice, canned goods, and toilet paper in quantities that stores had never seen. The authors describe this as a demand shock. The supply chain could not ramp up production of packaged goods overnight because it was built to produce fresh, perishable items. The flour that bakers used for bread was the same flour that consumers wanted for home baking. The system had one channel for restaurants and another for retail, and they could not swap easily.

How Did Governments Make It Worse?

Aday and Aday do not spare policymakers. They point to two specific failures.

First, movement restrictions were applied uniformly to agricultural workers and truck drivers, even though food production is essential. The authors argue that governments should facilitate the movement of workers and agri-food products. In other words, a lockdown can include exceptions for food labor, and those exceptions need to be designed in advance, not patched in after the fact.

Second, some countries imposed food protectionist policies, restricting exports to keep domestic prices low. The authors warn that these policies backfire. When one country hoards grain, prices rise globally. The poorest countries, which import most of their food, suffer most. The review explicitly states that food protectionist policies should be avoided to prevent an increase in food prices.

The deeper point is that food is a global system. A border closure in one country affects supply in another. A labor shortage in one region affects prices everywhere.

What the Research Does Not Prove

The Aday and Aday review is a synthesis of existing studies and news reports from early 2020. It is not a controlled experiment. It does not test a specific intervention. It does not provide exact numbers on how much food was wasted or how many people went hungry. The authors are clear that their goal is to summarize the challenges and recommend solutions, not to quantify the damage.

This matters because the pandemic was still unfolding when the paper was published. The authors could not predict how long the disruptions would last or whether the system would adapt. They could only map the fractures they saw.

What the review does not address is whether these cracks were temporary or structural. Did the food supply chain bounce back because of resilience or because the pandemic eased? That question remains open. But the evidence from subsequent waves of COVID-19, and from other disruptions like the war in Ukraine, suggests that the vulnerabilities are not gone.

The One Recommendation That Keeps Coming Up

Throughout the review, one word appears again and again: flexibility.

The authors argue that the supply chain should be flexible enough to respond to challenges. This is not a technical term. It is a design principle. A flexible supply chain has backup suppliers, multiple distribution routes, and the ability to switch between restaurant and retail packaging quickly. It has cold storage capacity for when fresh food cannot move immediately. It has contingency plans for labor shortages.

The opposite of flexibility is what we had: a system that ran perfectly until it broke, and then broke everywhere at once.

What This Actually Means

• ▸Diversify sourcing. If a single country or region supplies most of your tomatoes or wheat, a border closure or crop failure hits you hard. Countries and companies need multiple suppliers, even if that costs more in normal times.
• ▸Invest in cold storage and warehousing. Just-in-time delivery works until it does not. Having buffer capacity for perishable goods allows the system to absorb shocks instead of breaking.
• ▸Design labor policies for essential workers before the crisis. Agricultural workers and truck drivers should have clear exemptions from movement restrictions, with health protocols already in place. Waiting until the crisis hits creates chaos.
• ▸Reject food protectionism. Export bans might help domestic prices in the short term, but they destabilize global markets and hurt the poorest countries. International coordination on food trade is not charity. It is self interest.
• ▸Build processing redundancy. When one meatpacking plant closes, the entire region's livestock supply can back up. Smaller, more distributed processing facilities could prevent single points of failure.

The pandemic did not create these cracks. It exposed them. The question now is whether we will fill them or just wait for the next disruption.