New York's Looming Food Disaster

Photo courtesy of iStock/Beth Manicone

This article was originally published in The Atlantic’s CityLab.

In New York City, locating a bite to eat is rarely a difficult task. The city is a food paradise or, depending on your mood, a place of overwhelming glut.

But when Superstorm Sandy pummeled New York last fall, it revealed the terrifying potential for sudden food shortages. Flooded stores like Red Hook’s Fairway Market were forced to haul off loads of ruined produce, while persistent power outages and scant fuel supplies turned the banality of restocking into a nightmare for stores across the city. For markets nestled in lower Manhattan, the physical challenges were most grave. One bridge or tunnel shutdown might delay countless deliveries—amid disaster, a terrifying notion for stores like Met FoodMarkets in SoHo. “They only can get here if they can get here,” says Met manager Franklin Fernandez.

Smaller stores like Met have limited storage capacity, and often get cleared out in the days before an event like Sandy. Disturbingly, that supply headache can extend long past the immediate post-storm period. For Met, it took nearly two weeks to restore a working supply chain, Fernandez says.

Sandy is not New Yorkers’ first glimpse of potential disaster. The massive blackout of 1977 (and the subsequent looting), the great northeastern blackout of 2003, and Hurricane Irene in 2011 all caused similar crises.

This recurrence of disaster is why it’s so disturbing that city officials have little concrete data on how reliant their food system is on the private food distribution industry, and whether society is teetering a mere “nine meals away from revolution” (an ominous old expression that appeared in The Atlantic all the way back in 1945). Worse yet, they have little understanding of the logistical changes that have revolutionized how companies warehouse and distribute the food on which New Yorkers depend.

ood system. If you can’t gas up your trucks, how do you re-stock your shelves?

In recent years, fuel supply has also only gotten leaner, starting with the 2011 closures of facilities operated by ConocoPhillips and Sunoco. In February, Hess shuttered its Port Reading, New Jersey, facility, and is now looking to sell off its remaining terminals that service the East Coast. Analysts also expect a fresh batch of refinery closures in Europe this year—10 percent of plants there, by some estimates—on the heels of plummeting demand. According to the Energy Information Administration, these shutdowns will increase the East Coast’s dependence on supplies from even farther away, further straining existing transit and storage capabilities.