This is a great reminder of how important it is to support local farmers and small operations, which increase the resilience of the system as a whole.
This is a great reminder of how important it is to support local farmers and small operations, which increase the resilience of the system as a whole.
Food budgets would have to go back to the 1940's or earlier - where they were a significant fraction of take home pay. Now they are almost a rounding error comparatively.
I don't necessarily think that would be a bad thing. A lot of the asset price inflation like homes can be tracked to food and consumer goods taking an increasingly lesser portion of the family budget. Re-balancing this seems wise to me.
Access to cheap food would be wonderful if it were healthy! Unfortunately the cheapest food is typically the worst food for your health.
Part of it is also that "cheap" tends to lead to monocultures and other patterns that are more easily disrupted.
An example being the Cavendish banana, which for most of the western world is the only thing they know of when the word "banana" is mentioned. And now the banana supply of a large part of the world is in danger of going extinct [1]
And there's also ecological health. "Cheap" tends to promote mass production in certain areas and shipping everywhere. "Cheap" tends to promote less sustainable farming practices. That sort of thing.