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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

I hope we strengthen and cross link our food supply chains on a local and regional basis like this more in the future.

Having most everyone in a city or neighborhood buying from a single chainlink or two isn’t a very resilient system, nor does it make for very efficient markets.

Commodities like flour should be available sort of like data on ipfs; the problem is, of course, trust and risk of tampering. Hopefully it won’t be much of an issue and more decentralized supply chains can emerge, making more opportunities for more people.

I’d love to be able to be a local cache node in the food supply chain (or web, perhaps), as I imagine others would be.

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I think you just invented grocery stores

No. Everyone in my vicinity buys their non-restaurant food from 2-3 grocery stores. I am talking about having the community's food supply be provided by more suppliers, and each other, p2p style. Perhaps a data-driven "farmer's market" style setup.

Distributed, not just hub-and-spoke decentralized. We just watched the failure mode of that one.

No we didn't, we watched a supply chain shock which could've been prevented if we had some common-sense regulation to require supermarkets and grocery stores to enact purchasing limits if their demand curves start behaving anomalously.

Distributed systems in software are hard. Th idea it'll somehow be easier when you need to truck tonnes of physical goods around is wishful thinking - the same failure modes still apply.

Around where I live, supermarkets started imposing limits pretty quickly. It's in their self-interest not to piss off customers who come into buy something and leave empty-handed.

A lot of Americans have a truck or two, and a lot of storage space. I think that these events won’t soon be forgotten, and even if nothing more happens than more frequent group flour buys and a lot more slack in the chain happens (e.g. more people with 10kg of flour in the pantry) we’ll be better off.

An uber or craigslist or sia for staple foods would be cool though.

Cutting out the middleman (grocery stores) won't remove the hub and spoke architecture.

Particularly when it comes to staple commodities like flour, salt, sugar, etc -- grocery stores by and large buy these items from the same small number of distributors. Grocery and food distribution in general have been consolidating aggressively over the last decade or so.

More can definitely be done on this front with regional produce or prepared/processed foods though.

That's not how any of that works nowadays. How do you deal with agricultural commodities futures in such a model, the 'flip side' of which (crop insurance) is central to businesses in certain commodities? Sure you can say 'that whole system is broken and we need to go back to how it was before the Green Revolution', but that's just ignoring all the other changes we've seen in agriculture since then, and which are all subtly interlinked (like, do we want to go back to a system where double-digit percentages of the population work in agriculture? Can we?)

https://xkcd.com/1831/

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