Non-essential workers don't influence a food shortage. If those workers stay home their income may be hurt for a while, but in contrast to 1918 we have a social security system. Nobody's going to starve.
edit: For reference, Greece suffered from 18-25% unemployment for the last ten years. The economic effects of the pandemic will have bad consequences, but it's not an existential issue, it just sucks and will destroy some wealth.
It's starting in the US.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/04/16/meat-proc...
https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/26/business/tyson-foods-nyt-ad/i...
Depends where you are.
I think it's where this becomes quite problematic, re-balancing this requires people with a huge amount of power (the wealthiest part of our society) to accept being less powerful. That's where we've been stuck for years now. What we're seeing now is how this system should have changed before we were in this emergency situation because it clearly can't handle actual emergencies.
And yet it does feed people, billions of us. Even more so we have less extreme poverty and fewer people suffering from malnutrition than any other time in human history, with poverty plummeting since 1960 at least.
The current system wasn't built indeed, it was evolved, in tune with the industrial revolution. And it works. In the 19th century over 80% of the world population was living in extreme poverty.
The progress has been immense, both technological and social, in only one century, a blink of an eye in the context of human history. Any such discussion should acknowledge this.
> "...rather than a tool thought from head to toes to run our socities"
Yeah, you know what economic system was designed like that? Communism. So I'm skeptical of any such claims.
The real unknown is whether we have the political and social will to get there.
It's irrelevant if the economy is human-made or a natural phenomenon, because it is nevertheless what keeps us fed and with a roof over our heads.
There are indications that this depression is as bad as the Great Depression and might be even worse. It is true that there is no food shortage right now, but we might have one, at least from where I'm from, esp due to drought, which affected crops all over Europe. And guess what, during the Great Depression people starved to death.
So if the restrictions continue, I sure hope there's a better plan in place other than taxing the living shit out of the middle class that still have jobs and pay their taxes. Because we all know that the money required to keep the unemployed from starving will not come from the rich.