That's not how life works.

You ever seen the graph of foxes and bunnies? Where all the foxes starve when they kill all the bunnies?

That's what happens IRL, too many food producers go bust, the stored glut gets used, and suddenly you're not producing enough and people die.

A market-priced system for food in the United States would still allow for a massive amount of slack in the case of a supply shock. The typical American probably eats 20-30% more calories than are properly healthy for them, and many of their calories come from extremely feed and land-intensive sources like beef.

Of course, you wouldn't switch to this all at once. You'd announce that you are gradually cutting farm subsidies over the next ten years. The least profitable (efficient) operations would close. This would also develop slack in the form of unused land, which could be held in reserve in case of a supply shock like the one you're hypothesizing.

“Don’t worry if food gets too expensive, you could stand to lose some weight anyway.”

I don’t think I can give a response to this that’s acceptable on HN, but wow.

Is there something wrong with what I said? Is it impolitic to observe that most Americans exist in a serious caloric surplus? I am not excluding myself here or making any moral judgment on those who do. It's just a fact, and it is relevant to the concern that Americans might starve if the food supply contracted.

This might work if income were more equally distributed. If food becomes more scarce and the typical American has to eat 20-30% fewer calories, the price of food will spike significantly. People at the bottom will be priced out and will starve without government intervention.

Managing the food supply to make sure there's always a healthy surplus makes a lot of sense to me. The problem with holding land in reserve, as you're suggesting, is that it takes at least an entire growing season to start producing from that land. That might be too long in the case of a famine.

> Yes, because corn grows in 3 days

Our food reserves are huge.

> And panic buying also isn't a thing.

Panic buying can only eat up a tiny little fraction of a year's food supply.

> [just insults]

> That's what happens IRL, too many food producers go bust, the stored glut gets used, and suddenly you're not producing enough and people die.

Maybe that happened in pre-industrial societies, but that isn't what happens today. Today, when things go wrong, prices of some products go up a bit (e.g., meat), and people buy less of it, replacing those calories with cheaper ones (e.g., rice, corn).

The beauty of a well functioning market is that it's not centralized, things don't go wrong all at once, they happen on a gradual scale and folks can adjust.

Or just the right amount of food producers go bust, and things are stable. And then there's an episode of wheat rust/grasshoppers/drought/flooding, and then you're not producing enough food and people die.

(Or, to riff off of what vcf1 said, then you have to spend less of it feeding cattle, and more of it feeding people. That's survivable, at least.)

The US produces 13 billion bushels of corn per year - that equates to 2,200 pounds of corn for every man, woman and child in the country. Those numbers sound completely implausible, but they accurately reflect the sheer absurdity of US agricultural policy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_production_in_the_United_...

And that's just corn! We produce so much of so many other things that we would be totally fine if we cut production by a lot.

That also happens when you kill all the farmland, and deplete all the groundwater.

Except a large portion of the population can till up some backyard space and plant a garden to supplement their cellar full of canned food.

Additionally, the farmland and farm equipment that was owned by bankrupt producers will still be able to produce food after new ownership.

Gardening is a skill that many (probably most by now) people don't have.

It's also the case that a medium sized garden doesn't produce much calories.

> It's also the case that a medium sized garden doesn't produce much calories.

The gardener is doing it wrong if this is their result.

We may have a difference of opinion about what "medium" means, or about what "much calories" means.

When I say "medium", I mean something that is still a modest hobby, and when I say "much calories", I mean at least a few months of food for several people.