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AGENCY TESTIMONY
Overview of New York City's food system
0:12:19
ยท
155 sec
Kate MacKenzie provides an overview of New York City's complex and diverse food system, highlighting its unique characteristics and challenges.
- Describes the scale of food flow through NYC (19 billion pounds annually)
- Explains the distributed nature of the food system, involving numerous businesses and organizations
- Highlights the city's ethnic diversity and its impact on food supply chains
- Discusses the prevalence of small-scale, independently owned food businesses
- Outlines the varied food infrastructure, including physical spaces and transportation networks
Kate MacKenzie
0:12:19
Before diving into the causes and implications of food price volatility, it's important to understand them in the context of New York City's food New system and the critical role of strong infrastructure.
0:12:32
About 19,000,000,000 pounds of food flow through New York City each year.
0:12:36
This flow is the product of a complex mix of regional, national, and global supply chains that grow, process, and distribute food, and a rich local food economy that prepares food for purchase and disposes of food waste.
0:12:52
The workings of these supply chains affect the daily life of every single New Yorker.
0:12:58
Yet unlike New York City's other essential systems from our roads and our water and electrical networks, for example, our food system is not centralized in design or management.
0:13:09
Our food system is what we call a distributed system made up of tens of thousands of large and small businesses and nonprofit, essential nonprofit organizations in the local, regional, national, and global, and millions of consumers interacting largely independently to match food supply and demand.
0:13:29
So our food system is unique in two major ways.
0:13:32
First, our city's ethnic diversity necessitates multiple complex supply chains that source products from across the region and the globe to cater to our distinct tastes and needs of New Yorkers.
0:13:46
Second, and relatedly, the majority of food businesses, as you've pointed out council member, from grocery stores to restaurants and distributors are small scale and independently owned rather than national operations.
0:14:01
This varied and nimble business landscape is well suited to serve our unique needs and supports both economic opportunity and food system resilience, but it also poses risks including coordination challenges and the general vulnerability associated with small scale independent businesses.
0:14:21
With that in mind, our food infrastructure is similarly varied and complex.
0:14:26
Our infrastructure spans multiple phases of the food system, includes both physical spaces such as warehouses, storage, and storefronts as well as networks of transportation and market systems from our rich farmers market to online retail access and clearly our emergency food providers of food pantries and kitchens.
0:14:48
Across these settings, the city has made significant investments to improve all types of infrastructure.