Speaker 1: Let's start today talking about food shortages, there is a new storyline, a new
narrative claims that food shortages are imminent in the United States and that there is going to be
no food. The shelves will be bare as the failed former President Donald Trump would often like
to say Joe Biden even said it. This was about three weeks ago, and the context was the Russian
invasion of Ukraine and the related sanctions and responses. Here's Joe Biden three weeks ago,
Speaker 2: and nothing more to report with regard to food shortages. Yes, we did.
So talk about food shortages and and it's going to be real. The price of these sanctions
has not just imposed upon Russia, it's imposed upon an awful lot of countries as well, including
European countries in our country as well. Speaker 1: So on the other hand, we also have
kind of the more hyperbolic, fear based kind of reactionary claims. Here's one example from a
right wing host, Dan Bongino, who had a segment called The Devastating Food Crisis is coming.
Please prepare now and the preppers loving this. Speaker 3: The food crisis coming up. It's a
topic we've covered on the show and the radio show often, right? There is a devastating food
crisis coming. Ladies and gentlemen, and you darn well, better be prepared. Listen, I care about you
a lot. I'm not kidding. I love the audience. It's why there's an email
on our website. That's why I leave the Facebook page open for your messages,
right? I am here for you. I am one of you. I came from you, a middle class kid who had a middle
class job with a middle class life. Speaker 1: OK, so anyway, but
without his full biography, the point is the right is increasingly saying food shortages are
coming. Many of the people predicting the food shortages will also sell you food packaged food
bonus buckets. There's a lot of comments if you look at the Dan Bongino piece where people saying
from my Bible study group we can get food and all of this different stuff. So let's talk it through.
Is it possible that we could have a food shortage? Of course. Of course, there have been food
shortages in history and they are possible. The first step in really thinking critically
about this is what do we mean by a food shortage? Because there are some people who seem to think
that if food shortages? My favorite orange juice wasn't available, I had to get pulp instead of
no pulp. Or I like turkey bacon, but there was no turkey bacon, so I had to consider regular bacon
or plant based bacon. That's not really a food shortage. Now I'm going to get to that, which
is the products we expect just aren't there. OK, we're going to talk about that in a moment, but a
food shortage when we talk about it economically is there is not enough energy or there's close to
not enough energy, meaning calories available for the proper nutrition of a population.
And I would even go further. I would say there's not enough calories available from a reasonably
diverse set of foods. What I mean by that is imagine that in order to meet our caloric needs,
everybody had to be drinking corn sirup like, OK, we'd be getting our calories. But I would
still consider that to be a food shortage because it's not a calorie shortage, but it's definitely
a shortage of a reasonably diverse diet. So the first question is, is an actual shortage
based on that softer definition, not even going to be able to really get the food groups we need.
Is that likely this year based on the evidence we have? And the answer is no. It's hard to say more,
but there's not going to be a food group calorie deficit. There is going to be enough meat,
there's going to be enough dairy, there's going to be enough produce, there will be enough grains.
We're not going to actually have a shortage of calories from any particular food group.
Now, might there be a situation where in Portland, Oregon? There's no chicken
breast for a day at the local store and you've got to get chicken thigh.
Yeah, that that could happen, though those things anecdotally are happening and we'll talk
about why in a moment. But my store was out of a particular cookie, and so I had to get the Milano,
you know, I mean, most of us aren't savages, so we get dark chocolate. You might have to get the milk
chocolate. I know it's not good. It's ugly, I get it. It's ugly. I, you know, I'm for dark chocolate
as much as the next guy. But that's not really a food shortage, right? The shelves aren't bare.
Now let's get into what might happen. Just so we all know and when we're aware and we're prepared.
Is it possible that specific products might ebb and flow in their supply so that you might have
to choose something different that you're used to getting? Yeah, that is possible,
and that's definitely different than what most of us in the United States are used to. The war in
Ukraine is likely to disrupt wheat and sunflower seed oil and sunflower seed oil is actually
in a lot of foods that many of us buy. But it's more likely to be disruptive to countries other
than the United States. The U.S. is actually a big wheat exporter and producer. Poorer nations that
demand that rely more heavily on on imports of wheat are going to be more at risk, for example.
So like the wheat issue will hit Egypt, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Turkey, some other countries
there will likely not be shortages, but there might be some limited availability of meat,
dairy and some animal products. There might also be a shortage of lack of availability,
I think is the word I should say of some plant based vegan proteins those for two reasons.
One. There are some people who if they don't see the meat that they want, they might try the plant
based alternative. The plant based alternatives are also highly processed foods, and the supply
chain can't be accelerated that easily. A lot of those processed items that you can't easily adjust
the supply chain quickly. It can take six to nine months, so you might see that. So we might see
slight, sporadic regional temporary lack of availability of certain products. Now what could
cause the appearance of an actual shortage? Panic buying like we saw early in the pandemic? And in
that case, you know, is it really a shortage if a ton of people are pre purchasing a year's worth
of whatever? And what I mean by that is think back to the so-called toilet paper shortage.
There was no toilet paper on the shelves. That's true. But the reason was that a ton of people
bought a year's supply, so they're good now for a year. And as we saw, once the supply normalized,
we had fewer people buying the toilet paper because they pre-purchase it in the first month
of the pandemic. So that was an apparent shortage. It wasn't a real shortage. It's also, by the way,
interesting how a lot of the producers of some of these foods Tyson Perdue, for example, in poultry,
they've had record profits above and beyond the rate of inflation. So it's not just inflation
that's driving their profit at a time of allegedly significantly higher costs to them. So I'm not
ready to say that there is price gouging going on, but it is interesting that profit margins remain
at record highs despite supposedly higher costs and inflation and all of that. So we're going
to follow it. That's the best assessment we have right now based on the information that we have