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Comment by b34r | Hacker News Reader

I hope it doesn’t screw up our food supply too much. We get a surprising amount of crops from China and the rest of the world.

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The US exports a massive amount of crops to China, not vice versa.

US Agriculture Exports to China = $25B US Agriculture Imports from China = $5B

Source: https://www.mda.state.mn.us/sites/default/files/inline-files...

5b is a lot.

A large quantity of imports will be used to make US domestic food as well.

The exported good is not the same as the imported one.

Anecdote: Our caterer in silicon valley said there was a supply issue for tofu.

So I guess they import the beans, manufacture the tofu, then ship it back to us? Sounds inefficient, though I'm not sure how much demand there is for a large-scale domestic tofu manufacturing industry in the US.

US Tofu is by and large for animal feed or oil, not tofu.

Soy, you mean?

Trans-oceanic shipping is actually incredibly cheap that companies will do things like this if they are able to save a bit of money

see: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1534286/12000-mile-t...

China exports honey (real or fake), snacks, garlic and farmed shrimps etc.

Part of the reason for the ridiculous corn subsidies is so if the whole rest of the world ends, the US will still have enough food. We'll have to stop eating some specific foods (like we export chicken dark meat to China and they send the breast meat to us), but in terms of overall calories the US will be fine. Domestic distribution is a bigger worry, quarantines or just plain shops shutting down.

It is not the food that is the problem , it is the packaging. A large percentage of packaging products are made in China, so a producer may have the food here , but packaging will have to adapt with low to no supplies from China.

I'm not concerned about the food supply, I am a bit concerned about logistical problems of getting food to grocers if we have massive infection rates. This would hopefully be short lived though, as workers out could be back at work within 2-3 weeks. We'd just have to hope they don't all get it at once. I hope grocers are taking measures to prevent vendors from interacting with each other, and making sure their loading docks are sterile as can be.

Given that for the most part, our food supply chain is not composed entirely of 70+ year old people who will all simultaneously get the virus, while it's certainly not just "another day at the office" to keep food supplies running, it's not necessarily going to be as hard as your intuition may say, either. Especially if social distancing works and slows the infection rate, even the worst case scenario here is far from the metaphorical bodies in the streets and everyone lying at home in their beds, sick. On a day-to-day basis, it's more like a really bad flu season than "one day, the entire town just died".

The non-essential economy is looking at a kick in the face, but I'm not too worried about the essential economy. In the long run, I think we're going to individually remember this as an annoyance, not a catastrophe. There are some other social changes that may occur, but they're mostly going to be accounted as "social changes that were pretty much on track to happen anyhow, the Coronavirus just precipitated them a bit earlier and more suddenly".

Honestly, in a worst-case scenario, I would hope for the government to be rounding up able-bodied people who aren't sick and draft them into the Grocery Corps or similar to keep things moving. I really don't think it's going to come to that, but I pray that if it does, the people in charge are ready for that kind of task.

Damn knows I'll happily stop coding and go work wherever I am told to help with this.

I imagine a fair number of people would voluntarily agree to do that if it really came down to it. That said, I imagine nation guard, etc would be mobilized first.

I would certainly be up for it, at least.

That brings up the question, Should we be cleaning products/ food brought home? I mean, normally I will wash produce but what about everything else?

From a BI article, "In general, because of poor survivability of these coronaviruses on surfaces, there is likely very low risk of spread from products or packaging that are shipped over a period of days or weeks at ambient temperatures," the CDC said on its website.

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