Aging in the Land of Plenty by Berry Hodge

I believe that our food supply is strong however we as consumers must only shop for what is needed at the time to relieve stress on the supply chain so when times get harder, we are able to continue to provide products that are needed. Stores limit hours and number of items to allow workers to restock and stay as healthy as possible. Stores have been using new methods to help mitigate these spikes that are placing great stress on the food supply. The waves of frenzy buying due to spikes in coronavirus creates for some items not being able to move through the supply chain fast enough to get to consumers. With the food being available and diverted from schools and restaurants today’s grocery stores have plentiful supply. Kroger told its suppliers that demand has surged 30 percent across all categories. The sale of rice, beans, pasta, peanut butter, bottled water, and other products with long shelf lives have greatly increased. Our food supply system has plenty of food and is functioning but the “panicky” buying adds much stress to the system. In this article Anna Potts, the chief executive of the North American Meat Institute states that “there is plenty of food in the country”. From ultramodern indoor dairy units producing millions of litres of milk a year to small, old-fashioned farms making cheese with twenty or thirty cows, and from landowners whose families have farmed the same fields for centuries to tenants who have just joined the industry, Pye-Smith investigates the timeless connection between land and people in the twenty-first century.The recent events of Covid-19 have spurred the question of if our food supply system is strong enough to keep up with the increased demand.

How much do we really know about those who are supplying us with the most essential things in life: our daily bread and butter, meat and fish, fruit and vegetables? In Land of Plenty Charlie Pye-Smith travels the length and breadth of these isles to explore the little-understood world of British agriculture.

But in a fast-changing world, how does the great British countryside continue to provide the food we eat? Most people living in Britain today must go back several generations before they find an ancestor who worked on the land. Golden fields, ripening apples, lowing cattle: our idea of the landscape has been shaped by agriculture, as has the land itself.

Aging in the Land of Plenty by Berry Hodge