A journey down the food supply chain

Follow reporter Aaron Granillo as he traces food distribution across Washington state, finds where the system is breaking down, and talks to the creative people coming up with workarounds.

First, Chris Sullivan tells the story of one billion pounds of potatoes that were stuck on farms across Washington, while food bank shelves were empty.

The Washington Food Fund stepped in to refill food banks after donations disappeared almost overnight, and the need doubled.

Meanwhile, protests and strikes from agricultural workers in Yakima are escalating. The county faces the highest rate of coronavirus infections on the entire West Coast. So Dave Ross interviews the leader of the public health “strike team” sent into Yakima to investigate outbreaks in meat and fruit-processing plants.

KIRO Nights hosts Mike Lewis and Aaron Mason talk to the owner of Some Random Bar in Belltown about how he lost thousands more dollars trying to stay open for takeout in April than he would have if he’d just closed.

And a restaurant in Burien isn’t waiting around and hoping their customers will come back for dine-in service. Instead, they asked their community directly what safety measures they wanted and then remodeled their entire restaurant. Rachel Belle tells us all about it.

Finally, farmers markets in Seattle are reopening just in time for summer. But they’ll operate in a drastically different way. Operations manager Kelly Kube from the Seattle Farmers Market Association talks face masks, drive-thru shopping, and why you should buy produce you can guarantee no one has sneezed on.