Food is a global issue. Once upon a not very long time ago, food was largely regional. If the weather was favorable in your area, you and others grew plenty of food for your family and for the surrounding area. If it rained too little or too much, you were probably looking at a pretty rough winter. The next region over though was largely unaffected. Or if you wanted strawberries in March, you were probably just going to have to wait a couple of months until they were in season again. Now, you can get pretty much any food you want any time you want it. Basically, strawberries are in season somewhere and the food supply chain is robust enough to get them from there to your corner grocery store. Corn grown in Iowa goes all over the world, same with rice in China. Your last Big Mac might have come from a cow raised in Brazil. In a lot of ways, this is a great thing. Despite there being many more people on the planet than there were when food was local, more of them are fed.
However, it also comes with a couple of downsides, the biggest of which being that the food supply chain is vulnerable. Now, if the weather or something else disrupts the crops in one area, it doesn’t just affect that area, the whole world can quickly find itself short on corn, meaning many go hungry and the prices for everyone else get higher.
For a year now, COVID and the response to it has put unprecedented strain on our food supply, leading to issues from the local small town to far off villages. The response to COVID led to the shutdown of course of pretty much every restaurant in the country, except for takeout, led to the total disruption of the supply chain. Since people weren’t going out to eat as much, they turned to the grocery stores, which put so much strain on them that even Costco and Sam’s Club had limits on how much of certain items could be purchased, if they were there at all. It’s not that there wasn’t food, it’s that there are multiple food supply chains and it proved impossible to redirect the resources from the restaurant supply chain to the grocery stores. As a result, literally tons of food were wasted. Fortunately the system adjusted in a couple months and most people were only inconvenienced (that’s to say nothing of the unemployed who were relying on food pantries, but that’s a separate issue). Yet, the situation did a lot to show that something as important as our food supply chain is a lot more fragile than most would have thought.
Climate issues raised fears of further disruption just months later when a massive storm ripped through the plain states, destroying millions of wheat crops. Again, we seem to have gotten lucky with how the system has managed to respond and other than a price increase due to lower supply things seem to have remained stable. However, should we be faced with these things happening at the same time, we could be in real trouble. Imagine a pandemic as bad as we feared COVID would be, at the same time as a hurricane that decimates a couple important ports while a drought destroys crops out west. Does that sound far-fetched? Then you haven’t paid much attention last year. Any one of those types of events is happening somewhere in the world at any given point. All it would take is a flap of the butterfly’s wings to get them to line up a little differently.
How to weather such a series of unfortunate events? Right now, we can’t really say. Which is exactly why we need to come together and use our data and other resources to better understand the world we are living in. Only then can we hope to be prepared to handle major disruptions to the things we take for granted. It’s a simple choice, use our data to save and build a better world, or don’t use it, and hope we get lucky again.
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