Hello, this is Monica Rinegal, and you're listening to the Nutrition Dev podcast Welcome.

When the U.S. economy and society abruptly shut down in March 2020 due to a global pandemic,

food shortages were common as supply chains temporarily collapsed.

For example, most of the beef and the pork sold in the U.S. is processed in just a handful

of huge plants.

And when a COVID-19 outbreak shut, just one or two of them down, retail outlets quickly ran

out of meat.

And a shortage of long haul truckers made things even worse.

Fortunately, food manufacturers and distributors recovered remarkably quickly, implementing incredibly

effective safety protocols that allowed them to restore and maintain a highly functional

food distribution system throughout the pandemic.

However, the early days of the pandemic revealed a surprising vulnerability in our food supply

network.

The U.S. is a large country, both in population and in territory, and yet our food system

is highly centralized.

It's also highly efficient.

It's one of the reasons our food costs are among the lowest in the industrialized world.

One way the food industry boosts efficiency is through various agricultural technologies

that increase the yield or the output of every square acre that we farm.

Another is economy of scale.

It's more cost-effective for one farmer or company to farm a thousand acres than it is for

ten farmers to farm a hundred acres each.

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