Too Much Food in the Wrong Places
npr.org
npr.org
However, the article fails to mention the role that agricultural subsidies play in the oversupply. Regarding dairy in particular, consider:
> "... in 2015, the support granted to U.S dairy producers represented approximately C$35.02/hectolitre - the equivalent of 73% of the farmers' marketplace revenue. USDA data also reveals that US dairy farmers operate at a loss, and have a cost of production that is higher than what they earn from the marketplace."
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/american-dai...
This has been happening for decades, leading to artificially suppressed food prices and market distortions across many categories.
That doesn't sound too silly today.
Maybe we should also subsidize food transportation and storage or something.
I'd much rather get a quart of state milk once or twice a year for free while paying .2% more sales tax than having usable food destroyed.
In the Free Market similar approaches are used for things like insurance.
> I'd much rather get a quart of state milk once or twice a year for free while paying .2% more sales tax than having usable food destroyed.
Once you realize wasting food isn't bad and a surplus actually implies resiliency, that statement is just confusing to read. Governments subsidizing farmers to overproduce so that shocks to the system don't cause famines is a good thing. That just means there's either waste or obesity.
Some did, but take the tomato example in the article. Almost every sandwich from a restaurant will have a tomato slice. Home-made sandwiches, not as much. Some for sure, but less.
> People don't suddenly need less food during a pandemic
They might eat less, and they certainly eat differently. The US is overweight; it already needs less food than is produced. There's a good chance people are less active, so they need fewer calories, and produce tends to be low in calories, anyway. The only calorically interesting food in the story was milk. Milk sales have been in decline for a while, so this mostly school government milk not reflecting at-home consumption, and large amounts of cheese used by restaurants.
Anecdotal evidence I've seen, which is corroborated by my own study of N=two adults in the household, suggests that people may eat more. Staying at home and trying to manage stress seems to involve eating more. And white collar workers in particular won't have much different energy expenditure under quarantine than they did when working.
Produce tends to be low in calories, but high in other nutrients. It's not like making it available would displace staples, and it's better to eat fruits&vegs than multivitamin pills.
Restaurants on the other hand waste an impressive amount of food.
The demand for food didn't change but the kind of food changed a lot.
I'm a heavy purchaser of fresh produce. I've completely stopped purchasing most produce because these are in open bins at the market and I see people with grey skin who are obviously infected staggering around and coughing and sneezing on everything. I'm not convinced I can sufficiently sterilize things like lettuce and broccoli. I'm still buying carrots but remove it from its bag, destroy the bag, thoroughly wash, and only eat as cooked. Avocados I wash in soapy water, then spray with 90% alcohol. Lettuce though needs to go in the fridge, at which temperature any virus sneezed on it lives indefinitely. So for me no lettuce, no premade salads, no deli products. No problem, I have about 200 sq ft of garden with lettuce and many other things at present, and am adding about 200 sq ft per week to this, and will continue until I have about a quarter acre. this should be enough for me and for the neighbors that otherwise might attack and raid should things get that bad. I've got 30 tomato seedlings staged of 3 different species and these will go in the ground soon. In the past 3 tomato plants have given me huge numbers of tomatoes all summer long. This year I'm going for 10x that. I also have a greenhouse under construction, for managing next year.
Now what if some others are like me? They maybe aren't eating that lettuce, demand is down. Looking around, everyone I know is planting gardens right now. Baking bread is the new thing since there were actual bread shortages here in the US of all places. Not the Soviet Union. At present yeast can't be found. So everyone has their own sourdough starter and is basically manufacturing their own yeast.
The pattern of what people buy has dramatically changed.
I haven’t seen those things at groceries or warehouse stores for a while, but GFS had an entire aisle full of paper products and Grainger was well stocked the last time I looked.
I also suspect that, to an even greater degree than with food, people are doubtless--if not exactly hoarding--at least stocking up with a bit extra. Which, multiplied by millions of people, is a lot.
My case is probably pretty typical. Before things got really crazy, I checked around my house for levels of various things and picked up some more of anything I could even vaguely use some more of if shopping became more difficult for the next month or two. Which included getting a big package of TP which I wouldn't have bothered about for another month or so normally.
I live in the bay area, too... and I have a Target who's front door is about 200' from my front door. I have seen TP and paper towels... but it goes very fast when it's there. Of course, I called our close by friends as soon as I saw the stock and I'm sure others did as well. It was gone very quickly. If that's happening everywhere. Reductions in logistics capacity will also contribute to the slowness of getting some of this stuff to store shelves regardless of production capacity.
Until you start seeing "shelter in place" orders lifting, I think this is only the start of the consumable goods problem.
ADDED: Part of it is that a lot of people in cities don't have a lot of storage space. Furthermore, a lot of people also can't really afford to lay in large quantities of products rather than picking up enough to last a week or so when they run out.
The other comments about commercial vs. residential TP are good, too. Turns out our economy is complex. Think of how even this discussion about TP reveals a large scale bifurcation of how a singular, simple product is produced and supplied. Once you bring in the rest of the upstream and downstream supply chains... it's incomprehensibly complex.
This gets to something I'm concerned about which is the readiness of policymakers to designate this business "non-essential" and so should shut down, and that business "essential" and should remain in operation. How much does the essential economy depend on the non-essential economy? I mentioned logistics, I bet trucks carrying TP (of either class) also depend on other, less essential products... how many of these trucks were marginal in the good times and will end up closing up shop reducing overall readily available container space? Some of my clients are companies that make use of industrial CNC machines; and I've seen some of the same machines in use in very different businesses. For example, one client made higher end bicycle parts and the other made lab equipment for bio-tech applications. One is likely considered essential, the other not: the company that makes the CNC machines will still get business from the "essential" business while they won't from the non-essential business. How will that CNC machine company deal with the reduced economies of scale or their own suppliers that are perhaps less clearly essential failing to supply them? How will that impact the bio-tech lab equipment company?
I've also posted this before... but it's applicable here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XetplHcM7aQ
https://marker.medium.com/what-everyones-getting-wrong-about...
1. First-order hoarders, who hoarded when the panic started. I saw this when I went to my Costco on Feb 28th, which is when 99% of the country, and 95% of Washington State thought that this COVID thing is going to be no big deal. Any toilet paper brought out from the backrooms into the store would get snatched up in <10 minutes by shoppers. The Safeways, the QFCs, the corner stores, the gas stations around town, of course, had no toilet paper shortages at the time.
2. Second-order hoarders, who started hoarding when they heard that the first-order hoarders are doing it, and that Costco was out, so that they personally don't run low.
3. Weeks later, when the shutdown orders came in, people no longer go to work, so they don't poop on company time. The thing is, the toilet paper you use at work comes in giant rolls of half-ply, that are sold by the pallet. Demand for them has plummeted, while demand for 12-packs of double-ply has soared - and it takes some time for the toilet paper factories + logistic chains to retool.
Sure there's panic buying on top of this, but that hides the fact that there is an actual shortage.
Paper mills run on low margins and already (typically) run the mill 24/7 so there's not much more excess capacity.
I had always pictured canning as a thing people did in the twenties, not in modern era (unless they were hipsters), or just something that had to be done in a factory. But now I'm sitting here wondering, if it's so easy a bunch of kids could do it without poisoning themselves - why can't farms can the excess food themselves? I get that some stuff (canned powdered milk from the article) is harder to do locally, but we still did it with worse technology for many years.
Is it a regulation problem, are they not allowed to? Is it economics - are human-canned goods worth less than the cost of paying people to pick+can? Is it too hard to get canning supplies / train people to can on short notice? Do the grocery stores have deals with certain brands of canned foods that would prevent them from introducing locally canned items?
It's just interesting because while I've only been out shopping twice in the past month, both times the canned good aisle was hit much harder than the fresh produce section. I know this is a temporary thing, but it just feels like preserving food is something that has been done effectively on a local scale for so many years - it seems weird to let good food rot because large-scale canning factories can't keep up with demand.
(If you factor in the cost of your labor, that's probably not a very good deal. However if you think of it as a fun weekend family activity instead of labor, then you can get a lot of food for very cheap.)
I guess it's because so many people are fixated on stuff that will keep either on the shelf or in a freezer, but the fresh produce section is far and away the area of my local grocery store that looks most normal.
Canning tends to use lots of sugar or salt.
> There's argument to be made for canning the surplus on the grounds of derisking
You need staples in this scenario, not pickles.
Extra sugar = lots of extra calories = good in times of food shortage.
> You need staples in this scenario, not pickles.
Canned veggies in addition to staples would ensure more calories are around, as well as access to wider range of nutrients and more taste variety.
It' temporary only if someone can pick produce and people have the money to buy it. Having your own food supply is also peace of mind, someone who has gone to sleep hungry started to plan and it stuck to the family.
Covid will also change habits and lives. You never know when the next tragedy will hit and how will it find you financially. Having basic food at home for x months means you have a head-start.
Preppers and Mormons are huge into canning. Lots of Mormons have "canning parties" that double as social events for family/friends/neighbors.
I've been looking at local CSAs and most seem to be doing fine right now, but the pricing is way higher than in the supermarket (even comparing it to organic, grass fed to grass feed, etc.).
Are the economies of scale so large, or is it more of a segmentation issue? If CSAs weren't such a niche would it be feasible to bring costs closer to supermarket levels?
It is not that CSAs are expensive. It’s that most people pay less for industrially grown food.
Supermarket tomatoes are uniform, thick skins, picked when green and gassed them red, grown in thousands of acres, mechanically harvested, grown broadacre with chemicals and trucked thousands of miles by palletfuls.
How can you compare that to food grown in ten acres, harvested by hand and has the shortest distance from soil to kitchen and usually done by hand because true mechanization, automation tech and economies of scale hasn’t reached small farms.
The consumer has to make a stand and be willing to pay what food is worth. That our food is cheap is what fuels many of the woes of the world.
By definition, the consumer is willing to pay what food is worth.
On the other hand, the claim you're actually trying to make here, that the consumer should be willing to pay what food costs regardless of how little it's worth, is ludicrous.
Yes, the old labor theory of value. In one of pg's essays, he describes it as believing that if you want someone to paint your house, you should be willing to pay them ten times as much if they say they're going to do it with a toothbrush.
It creates billion dollar industries that don’t really need to exist in the first place. It destroys habitat and marine life with shipping containers plying up and down causing untold damage. It creates futures markets and commodity markets in Wall Street.
You pay. You pay by way of taxes and the cherry on top is inequalities in society and destruction of the only habitable planet we have for now.
Example: California grows 45 billion dollars worth of food..the food economy is worthy about 350 billion. We grew food and exported during drought. We exported water thirsty almonds to Middle East and China during a drought..so we exported water when Californians were asked to ration water and our water bills went up. And we paid the cost with no benefit to California. The beneficiary of a scarce resource..water..was those who imported Californian Ag produce at a discount when they should be paying more for it.
Not only did we pay..we lost. When Ag workers expose themselves to pesticides, they end up on welfare or Medicare..more than $ cost, we have created a whole new class of vulnerable poor people.
Pay more for your food. That’s what I say..stop destroying the planet for whatever pieces of genetic material you leave behind in your children. Do it out of self interest. Not altruism.
Furthermore, even if all of those problems of bad government were magically solved, it wouldn't change the fact that people won't buy things they can't afford. If you can't make the kind of food you prefer cheaper, most people won't buy it, because they can't. They're going to get the best deal they can for what they can afford to spend. Moralizing won't change that.
I am not moralizing at all. I am being rational. A moralizing stance would be wishing starvation and ill health and disease due to poor nutrition upon those who hold positions like yourself.
What would be? Figuring out how to produce healthy food more cheaply? That sounds like progress to me.
> I am not moralizing at all
Sure you are. You think food being cheap is "what fuels many of the woes of the world." That's moralizing. You don't get to dictate to other people how much they should spend for food.
> A moralizing stance would be wishing starvation and ill health and disease due to poor nutrition upon those who hold positions like yourself.
You are wishing starvation and ill health and disease upon everyone who can't afford to "make a stand" (your words) and pay what you think they should pay for food, since you offer them no alternative if they can't afford it.
Why do you think that is? Perhaps ‘cheap’ doesn’t equal good?
Less land, more food. Less people in Ag. How do you think one can magically end up with cheap quality food? Explain to me?
2. I am not moralizing. I am telling you what is happening in my industry. I am a farmer. I know why food is cheap and am under no illusions about why food is cheap.
3. I am not wishing starvation et al upon people, but that would be the moralizing label you gave me that I refuse to accept.
People are willing to pay more for a smart phone or a new pair of sneakers. They won’t starve to death because they paid for food what it is worth.
Cheap food is for poor people. When people who can afford to pay a little more refuse to do so, society and said poor people labouring in the fields end to subsidising those who leech off those who create value in the form of healthy food.
You get what you pay for...no such thing as quality for cheap rates.
On the other hand, this has convinced me to take a moralizing stance. Why do people who won’t pay for quality food from hard labour deserve good food? Perhaps they do indeed deserve what they pay for..
By people figuring out how to produce it more cheaply, so that the producers can afford to sell it more cheaply, so that people can buy it more cheaply. How else?
> Fresh fruit is more expensive than a bottle of soda.
Huh? I can buy organic bananas at my local grocery for 69 cents a pound. Even a single-serving bottle of soda costs more than that. A 2-liter bottle of soda costs a bunch more.
> Organic food is more expensive than conventionally grown.
Usually, yes. But the price differential is not always that big. Conventionally grown bananas at the same grocery I mentioned above sell for 59 cents a pound.
> Local food is more expensive than imported food.
Depends a lot on the locality. The same grocery I mentioned above routinely has locally grown produce, for the kinds that can be feasibly grown locally (things like apples, tomatoes, and various greens are the most common in my area) at the same or cheaper prices as imported.
> Cheap food is for poor people.
Yes, because that's all they can afford. But you seem to insist that "cheap" cannot equal "good". So you are condemning poor people to never having good food because you think it's unavoidable that good food can't be cheap.
> When people who can afford to pay a little more refuse to do so
Who said they were? I always buy the organic produce at the grocery I mentioned above. In fact my wife and I pretty much buy organic everything, because we are fortunate enough to be able to afford it. I have never said that people who can afford to pay more for food never do.
I am talking about the many, many people who can't afford to pay more for food. Is it a law of physics that healthier food has to be more expensive? Or is it because no effort has been put into making healthier food cheaper? Entrepreneurs have done wonders in making many other things cheaper while maintaining or even drastically increasing quality and capability (like the smart phones you mentioned). Why is this somehow not possible for food?
You are suggesting that food should be sold at a loss to the producers.
You are saying that food is a fundamental right that excuses the exploitation of a labour force that is essentially paid slave wages to feed those who want to pay for food less than what it costs.
Basically, you find it ludicrous that slavery is frowned upon by..the population that is slaving to feed billions of mouths.
The customer is willing to pay less for food that is reliant on long supply chains, then they deserve to starve when said supply chains fail them.
Absolutely, if you're proposing that the production of food be compulsory. That would, like your original idea, be completely insane.
On the other hand, I never said any of the things you seem to think I did. That was all you. What I'm saying is that if you paid more to produce food than that food is worth, you're still not going to sell it at more than it's worth. Instead, you should try to find a less stupid way to spend your time, something that is not actually worse than nothing.
1. You are saying that food is worth less than what it costs.
2. Production of food is not ‘compulsory’ and that food must be produced is ‘completely insane’. I don’t understand?
English is not my first language. So please help me understand.
I also don’t understand this : “you should try to find a less stupid way to spend your time, something that is not actually worse than nothing”.
Most consumers can't afford to. The solution is not to make everyone pay a lot more for food; it's to figure out how to produce healthier food cheaply enough that most consumers can afford it.
That's sort of what supermarket produce is--especially fresh and frozen. It may not taste as good as something local that's in season a lot of the time. (Though some fresh supermarket produce is local depending upon where you live.) But by and large it's perfectly healthy.
Ag depends on labour. Right now cheap food doesn’t come from better production but from economies of scale to a certain extent but mostly by hedging and importing from poorer countries where labour is cheaper.
Such a supply chain is unstable and unreliable. We will see food shortages in places like America as imports will fall short and labour dries up. The farm workers are the most vulnerable population. Most will likely be infected during this crisis and will contribute to community spread. Because there is no one willing to work as hard as them at such low wages, ag is going to come to a screeching halt in the coming seasons.
> Ag depends on labour.
Labor is not a fixed resource. Also, ag does not have to depend on labor. It does now because, as you say, the supply chain is currently set up to take advantage of the cheap labor which is available in many places. But it doesn't have to be set up that way.
And also accounts for the amazing progress of the 20th-21st century.
Ancient agriculture marked the birth of civilization. Modern agriculture is absolutely critical for modern civilization.
How can you say this? Every CSA I've seen does not tell you how much you'll get or what kinds you'll get on a weekly basis, it depends on the grow season. What numbers are you comparing?