Covid exposed the cracks in the US food system – meet the people trying to fix them

Food banks were inundated, restaurants folded, farmers had to dump produce - but the pandemic also created space for fresh thinking

In April 2020, while Covid-19 spread around the country, and millions of people were sheltering at home, Shay Meyers, the CEO of Owyhee Produce, one of the largest onion growers in the US, asked his workers to bury thousands of pounds of onions.

The restaurants, school dining halls, and event centers that normally bought his onions were all shuttered. His cold storage was full. Even though the demand for onions in American kitchens remained as high as - or even higher than - before the pandemic, there simply wasn't a way to get the food into the hands of those who needed it. In April alone, Owyhee Produce buried four million onions.