Like plenty of other business owners, Tom McDougall, the founder of food distributor 4P Foods based in Warrenton, Va., says things started to look bad for his company in March. That’s when restaurants and schools all closed to comply with social distancing guidelines to stop the spread of the coronavirus.

“Our farmers…had orders being turned around” at the loading dock at the University of Virginia, normally 4P’s largest wholesale customer, McDougall says.

4P Foods is a food hub, a USDA term for any facility that aggregates, stores, promotes, and distributes local food to consumers or institutions. McDougall wanted to prevent the food meant for UVA from going to waste—and prevent the farmers 4P worked with from taking a loss. While some of the produce destined for wholesale ended up going to 4P’s consumer business, it didn’t pick up all the excess.

The news is full of stories like these across the country: Farmers, unable to find a market for their crops or labor to process them, are plowing crops under or letting them rot. Meanwhile, food banks, which typically rely on donations from grocery stores of unsold food,are seeing those donations dry up as consumers buy more.

Though the U. S. Department of Agriculture announced that it will spend $300 million a month to buy surplus food and ship it to food banks, redirecting that extra food isn’t always easy. Industrial quantities of meat and vegetables need to be processed differently, and food banks, which often rely on volunteers, are short-staffed.

When 4P was still faced with extra food from its closed wholesaler consumers, they hired a local catering company to turn cases of ground beef into a pay-what-you-can Taco Tuesday. That got McDougall thinking: If he could stop a couple hundred pounds of beef from going to waste and feed hungry people, what could a larger group of motivated food advocates do?

The nonprofit Mid-Atlantic Food Resilience and Access Coalition, headed up by 4P Foods, launched late last month to connect food producers, food-industry workers, and consumers, to “feed and be fed,” as the coalition’s mission statement goes.

“Seven of the ten lowest paying jobs in our economy are in our food system,” McDougall says. “Those food workers, bartenders, waiters—they are seeking food relief for the first time. And if we don’t keep the food economy going and farmers farming,” the whole food system might collapse, he says. That’s why MAFRAC’s mission isn’t just to prevent food waste but to ensure that everyone who works in food, whether that’s growing it, cooking it, or serving it, is able to thrive through the pandemic.

MAFRAC is essentially a middleman, connecting farmers that have excess food and restaurants that have extra staff with food banks and relief efforts that need food or an extra set of hands. Sometimes it just takes an introduction, other times MAFRAC buys food itself. To staff relief efforts, MAFRAC is using an app called Get Shift Done to find work for restaurant staff that have been furloughed.

Right now, for example, Good Food Markets has contracted with the D.C. government to create 25,000 shelf-stable food aid boxes full of rice, beans, pasta, and more being distributed to needy families and essential healthcare workers. MAFRAC, as a subcontractor on that project, is working to ensure that some of the items in those boxes are made and produced locally. It may cost slightly more to include local food (MAFRAC is covering the cost differences through donations), but they’re betting that supporting local food systems during this crisis will lead to a more resilient system overall.

So far, MAFRAC has found a family-owned peanut producer, Belmont Peanuts, to sell 16,000 pounds of local peanuts for the food aid boxes. They hired a taxi company with 600 out-of-work drivers to deliver food to people’s homes. They helped Jose Andres’s World Central Kitchen connect with YMCA of Metropolitan Washington to distribute extra meals.

And then there were the apples.

Michael King runs Twin Springs Fruit Farm in Orrtanna, Pa. Normally, he and his staff sell fruit and vegetables at 20 farmers’ markets in the D.C. area. About half those markets are closed now, and many others have switched to a model where customers buy pre-weighed items in advance.

The farm had 16 tons of “seconds” apples that couldn’t be sold at market, and customers just weren’t buying the cider that Twin Springs normally makes with them. “It’s not a staple,” King says. He could have taken the apples to an industrial cider press that makes cider for grocery stores, but at the rate that press pays, “we would be basically losing money.”

A customer told King about MAFRAC, and after some conversations, the coalition paid King to turn their apples into applesauce, destined for the shelf-stable food aid boxes. Those 16 tons of apples became more than 12,000 jars of applesauce—so many that it’s taking multiple truck trips to get the jars to D.C.

The connection to MAFRAC, King says, “was a godsend. We just built a new building, and its mortgage is $16,000 a month. This almost paid one payment.” (It’s also about the same amount as the apples would have brought in had he been able to sell them as cider, he says.)

King is now hoping to connect a neighboring potato farmer to MAFRAC. “His business is mostly restaurants, and [MAFRAC] is interested in 60,000 pounds of his potatoes,” King says. “I don’t know what’s going to come of it, but hopefully something.”

Next up, MAFRAC is thinking ahead to tomato season—there’s about to be a glut of fresh tomatoes hitting the D.C. area, and McDougall hopes to find restaurant groups with spare kitchen staff to process the tomatoes into shelf-stable sauce. “We need to start to stockpile, because this is not going to be a particularly short thing,” McDougall says.

The pandemic has exposed weaknesses in the global food system, McDougall says. Industrial, mass-produced food is less expensive than locally grown food on small and medium farms because large farms can access supplies in bulk, can grow enormous swathes of one crop, and often rely on heavy usage of fertilizers and pesticides. (The subsidies from the federal government that encourage the growth of commodity crops like soy and corn don’t hurt.) Local and regional food systems don’t have access to the same economies of scale that industrial growers do—but they are more resilient, since smaller producers are able to pivot faster.

MAFRAC is working to raise $10 million dollars from the philanthropic community, because locally produced applesauce, for example, is more expensive than applesauce produced by national brands. McDougall says that $10 million won’t go all the way toward building a more resilient food system in which a pandemic doesn’t lead to empty shelves at stores while food rots in the field but “it would be a pretty good start for the Mid-Atlantic.”

McDougall says that food activists like himself had long said it would take a crisis for people to realize that local food economies are more resilient in the face of a disaster. “Now, here it is,” McDougall says. “We have the opportunity to mobilize these actors to be part of the solution, but maybe if we get it right there’s a new paradigm shift at the end.”

This pandemic, McDougall says, might be the first time that people have thought about how food gets onto their plates. It might be the first time that someone didn’t know where their food was coming from.But food insecurity is a reality for 15 percent of D.C. families andone in 10 residents of the region, disproportionately affecting communities of color.

“If any eyes have been opened [as a result of the pandemic],” McDougall says, “let us have an ongoing, forever conversation about what the future of our food systems should look like.”