Securing Pa.’s food supply: Lawmakers, Wolf Administration push to meet this most basic need

• By Jan Murphy/PennLive

 

Moving from a time when over half of food processors’ business was producing food in restaurant- and industrial-sized portions to these days where most people are eating at home has created a problem in the food supply chain.

The food is there. But it’s not in the smaller consumer-sized packages that people are accustomed to buying at grocery stores.

This is an issue that the food processing plants in Pennsylvania have brought to state officials’ attention along with concerns about food wasting and protecting food processing plant employees from a COVID-19 outbreak.

While state Agriculture Secretary Russell Redding said his department along with other state and federal agencies are working on addressing these issues, state Republican lawmakers are claiming it’s not enough.

They are calling for a more proactive approach, one that anticipates problems in the food supply chain and has a plan to address it without delay. Failure to have one could lead to food supplies tightening and more empty shelves in grocery stores, said House Agriculture and Rural Affairs Committee Chairman Martin Causer, R-McKean County.

He joined House Majority Leader Bryan Cutler, R-Lancaster County, in a Wednesday conference call with reporters to talk about the challenges the state’s food supply chain is encountering.

“It’s our job to speak on behalf of the people and help forecast some of the issues that could be coming,” Cutler said. “This is one where if infections would occur, it has a huge potential to disrupt a much larger portion of society.”

Redding acknowledged these uncertain times have revealed the complexities of the food supply chain and they are actively triaging situations as they arise to ensure food is available.

“We’ll continue to work in the department to ensure the supply chain is functioning,” Redding said in a separate conference call on Wednesday with reporters. “It is challenged at the moment in some places.”

The challenge of downsizing the food packaging from commercial size to consumer size is one that the lawmakers say the state’s manufacturers could help to address.

They are urging Wolf to allow the manufacturing portal established to help manufacturers produce supplies the health care system needs to also address this food packaging need processors are having. Manufacturers may be able to retool their processing to convert from institutional-size quantities to consumer-sized portions.

“There are manufacturers all across Pennsylvania we know can be creative and help us deal with these issues,” Causer said. “We really would like to encourage the governor to get more actively involved in this issue to strengthen our food supply chain.”

For now, though, that portal will stay focused on addressing the personal protective equipment needs for the health system, said Casey Smith, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Community and Economic Development, which oversees the manufacturing portal.

However, the administration announced it now has a Department of Community and Economic Portal to connect Pennsylvania businesses seeking personal protective equipment and related items with resources they need.

Redding said the department is working to get approvals from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and U.S. Department of Agriculture on labeling and repackaging bulk items into individual units for retail sale.

“We got so many items in food service-sized container whether that’s the eggs or milk that would be delivered in sort of a larger than gallon non-household” size, Redding said. “We had this several week period of retooling and it continues by the way because every company can’t make that shift quickly.”

Not every product can be downsized either, he said. Canned products are a challenge because they can’t be unpackaged and still meet safety requirements.

“We know they got products that we need so we’re trying to accommodate them through labeling support,” Redding said. “It continues and it’s painful to have to do it.”

Finding a use for bulk food products

Central Pennsylvania Food Bank executive director Joe Arthur said folks like him are racking their brains trying to figure out other solutions for converting the industrial-sized packaged food into meals for the growing number of people who lost their jobs and are showing up at food pantries and at food distribution sites.

One of the ideas that has emerged is a partnership with Operation BBQ Relief, a Kansas City, Mo.-based nonprofit disaster relief organization, to produce precooked frozen meals that the food bank’s community partners could distribute to families.

“We’re all for it,” Arthur said. “The families that are struggling now, the vast, vast majority of them have a microwave and oven at home and these would be great meals.”

While restaurants on a smaller scale around the commonwealth have been preparing meals for take-out to families in need, he said this is the first innovation to come along that can produce meals on a large-scale. The Operation BBQ Relief meals will be available for distribution in the coming days once labeling and packaging issues are resolved, he said.

“We are excited for this to come to fruition,” he said. “We’re just waiting for the producer of it, in this case Operation BBQ, to figure out those last challenges. But this will open up many hundreds of thousands of meals that we could get to the families through our community partners in frozen form.”

Cutler credited the administration for its work in arranging for meal kits, but said, “I think more of that needs to be done and we need to be attuned to it.”

Watching the waste

Supply chain interruptions have given rise to images of milk dumping, plants left to rot in field, and euthanizing animals. But Redding acknowledged some of this has happened in Pennsylvania but not to the extent it has in other states.

Lawmakers suggest there needs to be a plan in place to get that food going to waste to people who need it by addressing the problems facing the links in the middle of the food supply chain: food processing plants.

He and Cutler said they would like to see the state become more aggressive in acquiring personal protective equipment for food processor employees, not only for their safety but out of a societal concern in terms of the availability of food.

Noting four meat processing plants in Pennsylvania have shutdown due to COVID-19 outbreaks, Causer said, “We need to be looking at food service workers as essential employees just like health care workers.”

In a phone call with Redding and the governor last week, food processors told them workforce shortages related to the pandemic from employees either contracting the virus, being exposed to it or being fearful of getting it was their biggest concern.

“They asked us to please be sensitive about that and engage in conversations about what we could do,” he said.

That led to the department issuing guidance for employee protections and additional measures these facilities with widespread or limited transmission of the virus should implement. Additionally, Redding said his department is working with the Department of Health to explore testing of employees.

In a letter sent to the governor last week, Causer, Cutler and two other Republican lawmakers recommended providing for rapid Abbott tests that could detect the coronavirus to be administered to food processing employees before entering the plant. Until those tests become more readily available, they urged other health monitoring of food processing employees along with other measures, some of which were reflected in the department’s guidance.

Additionally, Cutler renewed his call for the governor to allow garden centers to open that have been shuttered since Wolf’s March 19 COVID-19 business closure order.

As someone who likes to grow his own food, Cutler said this is planting season. “That’s a time sensitive product that needs to get in the ground so that it can produce from now all through the summer,” he said.

Responding to a question about whether other states closed garden centers as part of their COVID-19 mitigation response, Cutler said many didn’t because they are considered part of the critical food infrastructure.

“I think we should treat them the same way,” he said.

Cutler indicated the House is planning to consider legislation next week offered by Rep. Russ Diamond, R-Lebanon County, that would require the governor grant a waiver to his March 19 business closure order to allow garden centers to open.

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