"Minnesota chicken farmer culls 5+ million due to bird flu." OH NOES, NO MORE CHIKN AT GROCERY STORE, WE ALL DIES!!!!@#%!
Yeah, not so much. Fear porn is real. Most of the food shortage....not so much.
I won't be so flippant to say there aren't limited quantities for some things, but lets be realistic frens, when Team Evil messes with the supply chain, things happen. Yes, certain things may be short right now. Things will be short in the future too. Some things yes, but remember a certain other commodity was recently believed to be stopped in production but had actually increased production nation wide by over 400% (ammo anyone?)
The reason for the shortage was not so much gov't interfearance (though they've been trying), as new gun owners, hording, and general high demand.
Will we run out of food and have to eat dandelions, dirt and bugs? Unlikely. Right now we are seeing hording, and therefore high demand. We also collectively have millions more mouths to feed more than anticipated (immigrants eat food you know, even illegal ones).
Both take a toll on our generally precise just-in-time inventory system, which is a must up and down the food supply chain to prevent spoilage. Add to that some fairly simple shinnanigans on shipping and some media fear from the left and bingo, fake mass food shortages.
"But Rooks", you say, "With all this surplus food in peoples houses, won't demand dip down again when hrders reach 2 months reserve? Your argument defeated by logixs!"
Hold up there wonder puppy. You forget, NPCs arent firing on all cylinders...or even thinking straight, just left. Remember that guy in CA who filled his truckbed with gas, just by lining it with tarps, then drove off sloshing gas all over the road and sidewalks?
Yeah, its like that.
Last food run i saw people buying 2 months of not just canned corn, but also milk, bread, yogurt, fruits, and deli sushi.
Can't fix stupid.
.
Anyways, So I work with farmers every day. Cow, pig, chicken, duck, crops. Only reason i see they cull a barn herd is when it is actual threat to the barn (local labs/vets checking, plus the farmers themselves, many amish too).
Farmers tend to be pretty based, and don't have time for much nonsense. Any farmer still out there (the American farmer is NOT gone) tends to also have pretty good business savvy, they have to, to survive. Long story short, wiping out large volumes of product isn't something you just say "do it" and they comply.
In addition. Believe it or not, wiping out a million here/there is not that unusual. Uncommon, yes. Notable, barely. Had a farmer just down the road take out .5 million due to flu, 3 years ago. Heard about 40k pig put down due to swine flu (yes, it was real swine flu). Didn't bat an eye, both still in production to this day. One SMALL farmer alone has 5 chicken barns, .5 mill IN EACH BARN. There are hundreds of these all over northern indiana alone.
Once you realize the actual scale of food production in the US, you will see the fear is manufactured, and 5 million dead chickens is... uh... chicken feed compared to actual DAILY production.
Yes, there is a lot more to it than that, yes there is industrial espionage in farms. The whole PETA highring people to work undercover at farms, then inciting/forcing/coercing others to video them doing cruelty to animals, yeah that is real. I personally know a larger farm that was targeted like that by PETA.
You always hear about the leaked video, but not when they find the dudes that did it were plants, and are now in jail for lying to officials during an investigation, false pretenses, conspiracy, not to mention fired and sued by the farm for lying on job app, breach of policy, etc.
Anyways, just a little bit of my take on this.
Best if you are worried, get out of the city, plant a garden, live in the country and make friends with farmers. When a city starves, i guarantee today's farmers won't.
Now im gonna go grill the family some T-bones, sirloins, and make me some mashed 'taters, and a salad, just because i can.... and its mothers day weekend....that too 😉
If there's no real shortages, how come grocery stores all across the country have whole sections that are completely empty? Very little rice, pasta, flour, chicken, beef, frozen foods, and more. I haven't seen a canning jar lid in a store in many months. I saw them that one time, and then there were months before that with none on the shelves. Not a single store in my area had the usual displays of canning supplies last year. I doubt there will be any this year. Some of the long-term storage food companies are out of stock, and at least one has shut down.
So there are real shortages across the range of foods and food-related items. You can see countless YouTube videos of empty store shelves across the country.
I don't know what the heck is going on here. Stores, including the big box ones that have had empty shelves for months, are awash in food - meat cases full, bread aisle full, canned and dairy full. I haven't seen this much food in Walmart since before Covid. Only place still with gaping holes is the canned catfood aisle.
Same is true in the smaller, regional groceries, which never were as bereft of food as the Walmarts but still had plenty of empty aisles.
A trucker told me the other day he's paying nearly $6 a gallon for deisel and that's going to cause totally empty shelves "within a month." No signs of it now.
You're lucky. The stores here have lots of empty shelves. Luckily my shelves at home are full. But there are a few things I'd like to buy, but they aren't in the stores any more.
This started here about three weeks ago. Prior to that, you couldn't find chicken in Walmart at all. If you did, some hoarder was loading their cart up with every package. But meanwhile the regional stores may not have, say, wings, but plenty of other chicken. I haven't seen this kind of stocks in a Walmart for a long time and now all of them have plenty of everything. I haven't looked for canning lids at Walmart. Rural King here had plenty. Amazon has oodles, have you looked there?
A lot of this people don't know about this. Here, menards and home depot have food sections. If you look there you may find quite a surprise. If the chain store shelves are empty
The Ball lids on Amazon are fakes. I ordered a box last year. The box says Ball, but the lids are blank. They are very thin, and the edges will cut you. The underside of a real lid is coated in white enamel. These fake lids had a thin coat of white paint that left bare spots of metal showing. The "rubber" seemed to be a thin coat of red paint. I have found some good lids at Lehman's.
Really it is this. It depends on the area, state, political party in charge, etc.
Main chains seem to be having a lot of distribution issues, smaller regional not as much
It could be partly the huge price hikes. More poorer people shopping at Walmart here. Prices are horrible. Also, Walmart is now more expensive on a lot of things than the two regional chains here. For example, a big pack of chicken tenders was almost double at Walmart what they were selling for at Food Lion. Regular prices at both stores. That could also be a reason why there's more food - people not buying.
I hate our local Walmart. Produce is close to spoiled, and meats you get turn rancid in a day of purchase if not cooked right away.
FYI we buy a 1/4 cow each year. The meat is more expensive but quality is crazy good, and goes longer because its so lean. 1lb of burg is 4.50, but it's like...87-93% equivalent. When we make tacos there is no grease to drain off.