Bare shelves

Empty shelves where produce should be. Coolers once stocked with yogurt, milk, cream and other dairy are yawning spaces of emptiness. Last week’s newspaper that should be in the stores on Thursday, did not arrive until Tuesday the following week. Christmas presents are slowly trickling in through the mail at the post office, in late January. This is Nome in late January, after weeks of being sporadically stocked with groceries and with no end in sight of stemming this emerging food insecurity.
We are used to wilted produce, frostbitten bananas and other food spoilage and won’t gripe when groceries won’t come in for a few days due to flights being delayed for weather or mechanicals. We get it, we know where we live and what it takes to get stuff to Nome and the region.
However, longtime Nomeites say that this lack of reliable restocking of food is unprecedented. This situation has been going on since Thanksgiving , and it amounts to a food security crisis at a time when there is no apparent disaster or storm to blame. Not even during COVID did we see this lack of stocked shelves.
What makes us think that we are prepared to grow as a city with a new port coming and all that talk about economic growth when we cannot even feed and meet the needs of our population in regular times without added stress due to a crisis or disaster?
If the Nome stores are bare, what do the stores in the villages look like? We are woefully unprepared for any future growth and have no plan or strategy in place to deal with food shortages or supply chain interruptions.
I would urge the City of Nome to get the players (grocery stores, cargo and passenger airlines and the post office) around the table and find out the cause for our current predicament and forge a plan to avoid this in the future.  —D.H.—