For this column, I will explain how the food chain works in the United States. The U.S. Department of Agriculture information in this article is from government websites. USDA is a cabinet-level agency that oversees the American farming industry. USDA duties range from helping farmers with price support subsidies to inspecting food to ensure the safety for the American public.

There are seven divisions that all work together to protect public health and conserve environmental resources.

One division is Improving Public Nutrition and Health. The USDA mission, to improve health and access to food nationwide, was born out of the realization that there is an abundance of healthy food in America and no one should suffer from nutritional deficiencies. The food and nutrition service aims to end hunger and ensure low-income families and children have access to healthy food. This is accomplished by implementing school lunch programs and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as food stamps. This agency works to reduce obesity by educating the public on active, healthy lifestyles.

For Pennsylvania, it gets more complicated. Susan Dalandan, coordinator of Lehigh Valley Food Policy Council, said, in Pennsylvania, as in other states across the country, the food system is a tangled web and is determined by how, where and in what form food is produced and sold. In Pennsylvania, but not in most states, the Child Nutrition programs are administered by the Department of Education’s food and nutrition service for the USDA. This includes the National School Breakfast and Lunch programs, Summer Food Service Program, Seamless Summer Option and the Child and Adult Care Food Program. The Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture sets many food production and sales rules under FDA or USDA.

The U.S. Department of Aging administers many senior programs, like Meals on Wheels, through the county’s Area Agency on Aging and in some places senior nutrition programs. The Pennsylvania Department of Human Services administers both of these USDA programs: SNAP and the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, which is designed to help needy families achieve self-sufficiency.

What is the food supply chain? It is the process of moving food from the farm to your table. There are several steps here, and this is very interesting in today’s food market. The process and all its challenges are pretty much the same for dairy, meat, pork, poultry and fresh produce.

Pork production, for example, runs the gamut from the hog farming, harvesting and food production via logistical services and transportation. A producer’s network may include more than 200 farms, as well as nursery and finishing farms that are owned and operated by independent farm families. The logistics and transportation branch transports hogs from farm to farm and from farm to plants, as well as finished products directly to large distribution centers. These, in turn, transport products to small distribution centers that ship food to local retail stores and then to your home. A break in any one of these links in the chain will cause issues.

Dairy, meat, pork, poultry and fresh produce harvesters are used to doing large production volumes. With the closure of food-related businesses (for example, restaurants, hotels, entertainment and sporting events, cruise ships, etc.), the demand for huge production of these types of foods has diminished by at least 50 percent. The food supply chain breaks as production employees become sick or symptomatic with COVID-19 or call out from work due to fear of illness. Whole companies have shut down due to large numbers of workers contracting COVID-19 and the inherent need to thoroughly clean and sanitize their operations. Some of these businesses may never recover.

Egg manufacturers last week talked about killing 30,000 hens since they cannot sell all their eggs. Egg sales pay for hen food and other business costs. Without selling their eggs, farmers don’t have the return on investment to keep the operation moving forward. As such, reducing the number of hens means less cost to the farmers during the crisis. This is another break in the food chain.

Besides plant closures, food supplies are diminishing due to a couple of reasons, Dalandan said. There is a lack of migrant workers to pick produce because of restrictions on labor visas, and fewer employees are working at the embassies to process the visas, which would allow workers into the country. From California to Florida, in warmer states where vegetable farms work year round, there have been reports of farmers leaving vegetables to rot on the vine because they do not have workers to harvest them. Reduced commercial flights and slowdowns at the country’s ports mean less food coming from overseas. Food processing companies have implemented more safeguards, such as social distancing, which means there are fewer work stations for tasks like slicing meat. Have you noticed grocery store deli departments no longer slice cold cuts individually for the customer at the deli counter? Slowdowns in a food chain will contribute to higher prices in the coming months; hopefully, this will only be in the short term.

Anthony VonBergen, Walmart store manager in Whitehall Township, said he continues to receive many truck deliveries daily. The only items flying off the shelves every morning are hand sanitizer, Lysol sprays and wipes, rubbing alcohol and peroxide. The shelves are fully stocked daily with these items when the store opens, but every day, these shelves are totally bare within an hour of the store opening.

David Cool, agency relations coordinator for Second Harvest Food Bank of Lehigh Valley and Northeast Pennsylvania, provides food to pantries in six counties. He said ever since COVID-19 affected our community, Second Harvest is seeing a higher demand for food, while the cost of products is rising.

In the food pantry network, we are seeing a 25-percent to 40-percent increase in families served - in some cases, even higher. The cost of food has also increased anywhere from 10 percent to 50 percent. Some products have shown price increases of 50-percent to 100-percent more since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. The biggest challenge, though, is finding staples and receiving them in a timely manner. Typically, when food is ordered, it takes about one to three weeks to receive it. Cool is receiving offers on product that won’t get here until mid-June, six weeks from now. Cool said Second Harvest just needs to keep on fighting and working hard to make sure everyone who needs food receives food.

Brace yourself for the next few months - you may not see your favorite products in the store’s dairy, meat, pork, poultry and fresh produce aisles, and those prices will rise. But remember: This is only temporary, and life hopefully will return to somewhat normal in a few months.

Don’t forget a great source of food is your local farm stand or farmers market. The produce season is just starting, and our Lehigh Valley farmers provide everything from produce to meat to honey, baked goods and flowers.