“The food supply chain is breaking,” Tyson Foods Chairman John H. Tyson wrote in an open letter published in the New York Times earlier this week.

And he’s not wrong.

Over the past month, anyone following the news might have noticed images of seemingly endless food bank lineups juxtaposed against footage of milk being dumped down the drain by the truckload and literal mountains of potatoes, onions and other crops left outside to rot.

Tyson, though, was referring specifically to the crisis in the American meat packing industry caused by the closure of more than a dozen plants due to devastating COVID-19 outbreaks among workers. Just three of those plant closures – including the Tyson Foods plant in Waterloo, Iowa – have already reduced U.S. pork production by 15 per cent.

In the Waterloo plant alone...

Read the full Opinion (co-authored with Ian Mosby) in the Globe and Mail.