Today, we see a lot of backsliding with COVID precautions and infection rates. Our food supply is vulnerable. As I wrote in FoodWISE, our food system is like an interconnected web,

“All the farmers, millers, butchers, bakers, grocery clerks, and cooks are the people who inhabit the web—making it work, and depending on it for their sustenance and livelihood. If one thread weakens or breaks, disruptions spread and potentially affect the entire web. A drought or disease outbreak that reduces farm production, a transportation breakdown or cut-off in labor supply, a change in nutrition assistance programs—all these affect businesses… We are all part of this web.”

Farm workers and agricultural labor, in Washington state at least, were some of the last groups to qualify for vaccination, and yet they are in one of the highest-risk categories. This makes no sense. Farm workers and local food suppliers need protection and support—to boost resilience.

A related story, in France, is about the Cîteaux Abbey, in the Dijon area—where I took the image for this vlog in 2016. The Abbey usually sells its fresh, semi-soft discs to retailers or onsite visitors. Coronavirus, however, has left the abbey’s Trappist monks with 4,000 cheeses (almost three tonnes) and no buyers (sales are down nearly 50%). See: Trappist monks sell cheese.

What to do with the Reblochon style cheese? The monks connected with Divine Box, an asset important to increasing their resilience. Divine Box specializes in sales of various Abbeys’ products. Go to its website,  and you’ll see that all the product has been sold—and resilience has increased, by leveraging assets and the capacity to adapt in these COVID times.

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