If you’ve been to a grocery store lately, you’ve probably noticed that a lot of your favorite items are either missing or low in stock. In some cases, entire stretches of grocery stores are bare. Why are grocery stores having so much trouble stocking their shelves? Unless you’ve taken social distancing to the extreme and have completely shut down the outside world, then you know that the current coronavirus (also known as COVID-19) pandemic is escalating every day. People who are worried about the future have been panic-buying everything from toilet paper to water, either because they’re worried about potentially being quarantined or because they don’t want to face a shortage of goods. Ironically, it’s this panic-buying that is leading to a shortage of goods in the first place. Stores like Walmart are cutting their hours and putting purchase limits on high-demand items, but household staples are still flying off the shelves. This may lead some people to think that food production is slowing down, but that simply isn’t the case. “There is food being produced,” Julie Anna Potts, chief executive of the North American Meat Institute, told The New York Times. “There is food in warehouses. There is plenty of food in the country.”