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Was just talking to my wife about it this morning. Grocery stores can only supply what they receive. Makes me glad for the 100 pounds of venison in the freezer.
Just like grocers…people working in the food industry need to be protected not only because they handle our produce/food BUT like medical providers, if they get sick, food will be in short supply resulting to HOARDING! Worst, price gouging and other vulture capitalism will rise, much to the delight of the Wallstreet/RethugnCONS!
What’s plain about the ramifications of this event on our economy is that we’re all living on borrowed time.
The engine of the so-called stock market has driven our dependency on tomorrow. One bit of sand in the machine and we can all starve to death.
Capitalism and free-market economics looking like what it is - a noose hanging over a treadmill.
I would hope that the idea of buying food (not just meat) locally would become a regular habit as it was many decades ago. Unfortunately, the population of NYC alone is much greater than it was when local distribution was all there was that I don’'t think it would be feasible.
Ottumwa JBS plant to remain open after employee tests positive for COVID-19
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JBS_S.A.
JBS S.A. is a Brazilian company that is the largest (by sales) meat processing company in the world, producing factory processed beef, chicken and pork, and also selling by-products from the processing of these meats
Heaven forfend! People will just have to go out and capture their own pangolins.
– Millions of vegetarians, tired of pandemics caused by meat eating.
But these workers are just “takers”, while the owners sheltering in place on their yachts and islands are the “makers”, right?
We’ll all turn into vegetarians.
For anyone with a bit of yard space, I recommend ordering your seed packets now. For all others, Google 5-gallon bucket gardening 
Also, apparently if you keep the cores from heads of lettuce and place them in a shallow dish with water, they’ll soon put out new leaves! (And yes, I fully comprehend how desperate that makes me sound.)
Yeah these things don’t get started because someone ate an artichoke.
I’ve already thought about that aspect of it.
If you cook your food, it should be OK. Forget the raw veggies.
20 years ago, I did EMT training in an Iowa city with meat-packing plants.
The EMS personnel were forbidden to go on the factory floor; they had to wait for the company nurse, or whoever, to package the patient and bring him/her out to the ambulance.
Yes, that made assessment a treat.
What Happens If Workers Cutting Up the Nation’s Meat Get Sick?
Why, we cook and eat them, of course.
Silly question.
I’ve seen the (ever changing) time spans of the virus being active all sorts of surfaces, but I haven’t seen any for food. Does anyone know the estimate for that time span for meat, fruit, etc?
As a small-scale vegetable and chicken farmer in New York’s Hudson Valley (and a former resident of Brooklyn) I can drive a truckload of produce to your door in 2 hours. There are lots and lots of fallow fields between me and you that are just begging to be re-commissioned as farmland. I don’t know what you do for a living, but as a farmer I know for a fact that NYC’s demand for food could be served entirely by local farms. The problem is the high cost of land, and the relatively low return on farming. It’s very difficult for a farmer to pay the interest on a 30-year million dollar mortgage with the profits she is making from farming. What about government help for small-scale, local farmers? Gee, where would that money come from? How about from the subsidies currently paid to agribusiness giants whose methods of monocrops and pesticides are literally killing the land? And whose methods eventually produce disease–remember the romaine lettuce disease? Also, hydroponic farming, where vegetables and fruit are grown indoors and so don’t require soil, is already being conducted in NYC, on rooftops and in old warehouses. We need money to make all this happen. But don’t say it’s not feasible, because it is. Go to your local grocer or your favorite restaurant (wear a mask) and ask them if they are buying local. That’s a start.
Thank you for doing what you do.
I am grateful that the local and regional farms in my area (eastern MA) have quickly set up excellent delivery options so that I have been able to keep buying from them. It is extremely valuable and currently I feel like it is the least stressful way of getting food supplies while also allowing me to continue to support the farmers who need it.
I’m hoping that enough people are able to find a way to still take advantage of the food that is being produced near them, our local farms are as invaluable as our medical personnel heroes and so needed at all times, but especially in this crisis.
I’m pretty sure broccoli houses millions of bacteria. That’s why I’m sure it tastes so bad.
Well, it’s easy for you to be smug. You know that when the first virus makes the giant leap from plant to human, and your body begins to crave sunlight and well-aged animal manure, Monsanto has Roundup at the ready to kill off your occasional outbreaks of leafy growths.
And you and I have millions of microbes, too.
Ed Yong’s 2016 book, I Contain Multitudes is a great read.
NYT book review, which should have mentioned that it quoted Sting:
Reader, as you read these words, trillions of microbes and quadrillions of viruses are multiplying on your face, your hands and down there in the darkness of your gut. With every breath you take, with every move you make, you are sending bacteria into the air at the rate of about 37 million per hour — your invisible aura, your personal microbial cloud. With every gram of food you eat, you swallow about a million microbes moreBlockquote