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.
> 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.
In the Free Market similar approaches are used for things like insurance.