Source:  NCSU COLLEGE OF AG & LIFE SCIENCES, 8/6/21


The North Carolina Local Food Council (NCLFC) serves as a collaborative network across different organizations and state agencies to support the state’s local food systems and producers. The council was created with the help of NC State Extension and became centerstage during the statewide shutdown in 2020, helping fisheries, producers and food banks navigate through food security and supply chain issues.

“One of the main pinch points we saw early on was cold storage,” says Angel Cruz, NCLFC coordinator and NC State academic and extension initiatives manager for the Center for Environmental Farming Systems (CEFS). “A lot of schools, restaurants, universities and hospital cafeterias were shut down because of the COVID-19 pandemic. All of this food was all of a sudden donated to food banks or food pantries but they didn’t have the storage capacity.”

Thousands of pounds of local and perfectly good produce was dumped because there wasn’t a place to store it all. Cruz says it was happening all over North Carolina. Cruz and her colleagues, including Hannah Dankbar, NC State Extension local food program manager, and Joyce Yao, program associate for NCLFC, began meeting weekly with other folks from other organizations to see how they could help. 

“If the council didn’t exist, I’m not sure these conversations would have happened and we would not have collaborated to find solutions during the pandemic,” says Yao.

For more of this story, click here.