A corn farm in Richmond County, VA by Chesapeake Bay Program licensed under Creative Commons.

In response to a food chain left broken by the coronavirus pandemic, a group of 25 organizations including restaurants, food pantries, and farms are working to keep restaurant workers employed, food pantries stocked, and people fed.

The Mid-Atlantic Food Resilience and Access Coalition (MAFRAC) relies on a wide network of businesses, as well as organization and management practices, to ensure that food and other products intended for the marketplace are not wasted.

Out of crisis comes ingenuity

In mid-March of this year, Tom McDougall attended a food conference in New Orleans, Louisiana. This year’s theme was how local businesses can work together to build food systems and economies that are resilient, sustainable, and inclusive.

While McDougall was at the conference, the University of Virginia closed its doors. Then James Madison University closed. And then all of DC’s public schools closed. For McDougall, who owns 4P Foods, a business that delivers locally sourced food to customers throughout the Washington region and donates a portion of their products to local food banks, this was a nightmare scenario unfolding almost a thousand miles away.

Within hours, half of McDougall’s business shut down. Businesses throughout the region went into panic mode. “Is this the beginning of the end for our company?” McDougall asked.

“Oh shit, what about the farmers? We have hundreds of farms that rely on us!” McDougall recalls saying in the immediate aftermath of the closings. He thought about their razor-thin profit margins. Like a gathering tidal wave ready to crash, McDougall saw that the local food system was going to be overrun.

McDougall’s has a special connection to farmers. His company is considered a food hub, which, according to the USDA, connects local farmers and other producers to markets they would otherwise not be able to reach on their own.

Someone needed to do something, or else food pantries would be overrun, people would be laid off. Families would have nowhere to turn for their meals.

At the same time McDougall recalled, he and several local businesses, restaurants, farmers, distributors, food access groups and advocacy organizations started to go through their lists of contacts. Their goal was to keep the system from falling apart — to keep people in their jobs, farmers on their farms, food on people’s tables — and to respond to the growing need for food. There were food orders bound to UVA on the day it closed, and they all got turned around. Hundreds of pounds of beef, cheese from a small producer in Shenandoah Valley, lettuce greens from a hydroponic farmer in Schuyler, Virginia, and tomatoes from an Amish farm in southern Virginia. Phone calls were made, orders re-directed. McDougall raced back home.

A snap decision was made. The producers would try and get someone to turn their ingredients into tacos. A company in Charlottesville said they could help by making tortillas. Another company in Richmond said they would make the salsa. A woman-owned catering company in Fauquier County said they’d do the catering to keep their workers working. They set up in a community college parking lot and distributed the food for a suggested donation of 10 dollars — everyone was fed regardless of whether they had the means to pay.

This was the birth of a new alliance dubbed “MAFRAC” (Mid-Atlantic Food Resilience and Access Coalition) — a group of 25 different organizations — restaurants, food pantries, farms, and other businesses and organizations connected with the local food system. They are making sure that restaurants continue to have business, farmers continue to find ways to sell their products and pay their bills, and that food pantries continue to remain stocked.

Today, they’re working to make sure food and other goods that could have been lost, find a home with the people who need it most.

Apples saved by MAFRAC. Image by MAFRAC used with permission.

Flexibility and organization help make MAFRAC work

The group uses a construct similar to a civil-military operations center, where they hold daily staff meetings and cross-coordinate on issues impacting people across the regional food system. One of their primary project managers is a Marine Corps veteran with 25 years of experience, who helps advise the team.

They have a weekly “asset mapping exercise” where each partner goes through answers to questions like “Do you have trucks? Do you have food? Do you have refrigerator space? Do you have volunteers?”

Through this process, they try to collectively identify and prioritize needs and then work together to provide solutions. McDougall said that retired Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis had also pitched in to review their coordination processes.

In mid-April, the alliance was able to help a local family farm turn a potential loss of 16 tons of apples into a profit by finding another use for them. Instead of being turned into apple juice, they were crushed into apple-sauce — a shelf-stable product with more demand than apple juice or cider.

Carolynn Brunette, the managing director for the family foundation Prince Charitable Trusts, which provided $150,000 to MAFRAC, said that she believed the regional food system is “obviously broken,” and that by supporting this coalition their organization was trying to help foster some much needed innovative thinking around food.

When the pandemic hit, she said, many non-profits and philanthropic organizations grew concerned about what would happen to the charities they’ve been long supporting. Giving to MAFRAC was a way of “protecting our investments” within the food system, she said.

A chart indicating how MAFRAC works with farms, businesses and people who need food. Image by MAFRAC used with permission.

There’s still room to grow

Brunette recognizes that the coalition hasn’t quite figured out how to do everything just yet. For one, “it hasn’t connected as deeply at the community level on the access side” as some people would want, she explained. She went on to say that landscaping, or identifying who’s who in the food chain, is “very important” for any partnership of this scale that is looking to take on the massive challenge of adapting a food distribution system to meet community-level needs.

“It’s never as fast as everyone wants it to be. But in order for it to be good,” she said, people have to keep pressing forward with the understanding that these types of innovations need enough time to fully germinate.

In this way, Brunette said she believed that by tackling the logistical, structural, and communication challenges faced by such an endeavor, MAFRAC was fostering innovation.

Both Brunette and McDougall say they’re anxious to see what the alliance ends up doing once everything is over. They both said they’re holding out hope this project helps make the regional food system better at connecting people with each other, and meeting the needs of farmers and consumers alike.

  • Island Press Urban Resilience Project
  • Meyer Foundation

This article is part of the GGWash Urbanist Journalism Fellowship, made possible in part by the Island Press Urban Resilience Project and the Meyer Foundation.

Will is a former Urbanist Journalism Fellow with Greater Greater Washington who now serves as an accountability reporter for both Street Sense Media and The DC Line. He recently earned an MFA in Creative Writing at American University. Prior to this, Will served eleven years in the Marine Corps where he did multiple deployments to Afghanistan, and the Asia-Pacific. He is also a polyglot who speaks six languages to varying degrees of fluency (Chinese, Dari, English, French, Korean, and Spanish).