FWIW I've had a growing concern about the food supply for a couple weeks now. Reports of dumped milk, crops plowed under, reliance on vulnerable immigrant populations to pick/harvest food (what happens if they don't want to/can't come?), outbreaks at packing/distribution plants, the locust swarm, pictures of cars snaking around mall parking lots in a modern day bread line (I counted over 200(!) cars in one photo).
This is also particularly concerning, although I don't know if it's immediately relevant to developed countries:
“If we can’t reach these people with the life-saving assistance they need, our analysis shows that 300,000 people could starve to death every single day over a three-month period”, he upheld. “This does not include the increase of starvation due to COVID-19”.
From what I can gather, there are two food distribution systems: retail, and institutional. It's generally the same food, but retail is packaged in quantities suitable for individual households, whereas institutional is bulk in a way that neither households nor grocery stores can handle well (e.g. something like a 35lb tub of peanut butter, a pallet of #10 cans).
This is the logic that puts alarm bells in my head: 1) A non-trivially large fraction of meals pre-coronavirus were institutional meals (e.g. restaurants, work sites, schools, airlines, etc.). 2) Demand from institutions for bulk foods is way down because of lockdowns. 3) It isn't easy for institutional farmers/distributors to retool the supply chain/packaging for retail (that takes lots of time), meanwhile the food itself is time sensitive (spoilage) and it costs farmers money to pick/harvest the food
that they can't sell, so it's potentially a matter of their own financial survival(!) to just plow it under. 4)
All that food that would have fed someone is now gone from the system and ... 5) All those extra meals have to be picked up by the retail system (i.e. grocery stores and their distributors). A recipe for shortage. Hopefully the system adapts in the coming months to handle these supply issues, or that my logic is seriously flawed in some way.
That said, there could be some important sources of slack in the system: minimizing the embarrassing amount of food waste (in the US at least), victory gardens, a decent number of meal available through take-out/pick-up from restaurants, etc. Will there ultimately be shortages where people have to go without in the developed countries? I don't have a clue, but I think it might be
possible, and if there's even a 5% chance of us going hungry, I think it's worth it to look into insurance against it.
Oversimplifying things, food provides 1) calories and 2) nutrition. Both are important, but in a pinch - let's say, a 1-3 month period where things get hairy - I'd rather have 1 over 2. That means grains over greens, for example. Over the last couple weeks, we've managed to accumulate an additional ~40 lbs of various grains and 10 lbs of nuts per person, as well as a couple flats of certain canned items (beans, tomatoes), sourced mostly through the sidelined institutional supply chain/restaurant supply stores. All of it is stuff that we routinely eat, and the cost was about what we would pay retail, so the total cost for some degree of insurance is basically the time it took to browse inventories on the couch. We've also got a little victory garden going, although I don't expect much from that. Produce supply hasn't been crimped at our local grocery stores in the same way that packaged foods have, and California farmers markets are pretty awesome, given the Central Valley...so I'm a little less worried about losing access to nutrition.
In any case, if this somehow all blows over and we've got way too much food that'll go bad before we can eat it (shouldn't be a concern), we'll donate it to a local food pantry.
