#139 - Is There Really A Food Shortage?
It seems every time I turn around I hear someone talking about the food shortage and wondering how bad it will get. Recently you can't walk into a Walmart or Kroger store without seeing signs on the bare canned vegetable shelves about the food shortage.
Lets take a breath here and think about this for a minute and use some common sense before we start yelling "SHTF" and "it's the end of the world".
What the stores are supposedly short of is canned vegetables, that's it. Not fresh vegetables or frozen vegetables, only the canned vegetables are "in short supply".
Everyone is blaming this on the severe weather and flooding across the United States this spring, but they are incorrect in their assumptions. First off, if the vegetables were affected by the severe weather and storms this spring, they would NOT already be in cans at the store.
Those canned vegetables were not canned this year, that was from last years stock at the very earliest. Canned vegetables do not go from the farm to the processing plant and get canned then sent on to the stores within a matter of days or even weeks. These cans have been sitting on pallets in warehouses for months before they ever get sent to the stores to be sold.
Fresh vegetables and frozen vegetables have to be sent to the stores as quickly as possible so they do not loose their freshness and can still be sold. Canned vegetables do not go bad that quickly, they are good for several years. Yet there is no shortage of fresh or frozen vegetables in sight.
If there truly is a "shortage" of these canned vegetables, then it is a man-made shortage, and I firmly believe that is the case. I believe that someone is trying to manipulate the prices that the food is sold for by creating a "shortage" to drive the costs of the food up.
There were a couple things that I started noticing before the "shortage" came into being. The media kept pushing their videos and stories about how farmers were upset with Trump over the trade situation with China, even though the majority of the farmers agree with the direction that Trump as decided to go with China. There will always bee some farmers who can not see the big picture and see that in the end it will help them more than it will hurt them, and the media jumped on that and exploited those farmers.
Several of those farmers mentioned possible food shortages as the outcome, which did not make any sense to me at the time because their whole complaint was that China was no longer buying their crops. So if China is not buying your crops, and you have crops left over, how does that translate into a food shortage?
There was severe weather and flooding occurring, like there has been many other years in the past, and yes that will delay getting crops into the fields, but it does not completely prevent it from happening. It just means that those crops will have a later harvest than normal or if they harvest on-time so they can plant a second crop, they will have a smaller harvest than normal. We go through this same thing almost every spring when snowfall in the mountains ruins off into the streams and rivers causing them to rise and we have storms which leads to flooding.
When this happens, the first thing affected is the fresh produce, after that is the frozen produce, after all of that the canned produce would be affected. But that is not what happened this time, the ONLY thing affected supposedly was the canned vegetables which are probably still sitting in warehouses somewhere not being shipped out to drive their prices up so they can make more on each can they sell.
Once the media started talking about this social media blew up about the coming food shortages. People started freaking out and hoarding food when they saw it available which only made things worse. People let their fears get the better of them and started believing the "food shortage" propaganda and started passing it along on social media.
The "shortage" was not even for all canned vegetables, it was mainly just certain vegetables like green beans. I'm sorry, but whoever concocted the "shortage" scenario forgot to look at a calendar or they would have seen that green beans were not even being harvested at that time of the year except from greenhouses, which were still operating through the storms. Green bean harvesting season did not happen until after they were suddenly missing from the shelves in the stores, but keep in mind that was only canned green beans, not fresh or frozen. Potatoes was another one, even though the main area of the country affected by the flooding s not where the majority of the potato farms are located. I guess in addition to not checking the calendar, they also forgot to look at a map when they came up with their "food shortage" scheme.
The biggest crop affected by the storms and flooding is sweet corn, which was not being harvested at that time of their year either, yet suddenly there is a canned sweet corn shortage. Now that corn has been harvested from the fields, there is finally a shortage of fresh sweet corn, but there is still an overstock of corn that is used for ethanol and animal feeds.
Stop buying into the mass-hysteria that the media and social media is pushing out there. If you were prepared as you should have been, you should have felt absolutely no effects whatsoever from the "food shortage". The only way I knew anything about it was from the news and social media. I actually had to drive to a Walmart store just to see their shelves for myself. It did not affect me in the least because I am prepared for that situation as all of you reading this should be. Even the Department of Homeland Security for the past couple of years has been telling everyone that they need to have at least a 6-month supply of food stored up.
So, this time next year if my supplies start to run low I will think about there being a food shortage but that is only if I was not able to produce what I need in my own garden. Until then it is business as usual, just another day.
Until Next Time,
Aloha & 73
