Aseahawkfan wrote:No, but you might see a run on potatoes, rice, and beans. Vegetables are not high quality sources of protein. The best vegetable sources of proteins are beans and peas with quinoa (too expensive for most people) and pasta being decent.
Maybe. If panic buying starts to threaten the nation's food supply, they might have to start instituting rationing. Some store are already limiting the purchases of some products. But I doubt that the situation gets that serious.
Back to meat and poultry. I've read where we still have a quite large supply of those products but they're in frozen warehouses. Sometimes panic buying will cause stores to temporarily run out as the transportation pipeline is timed to match demand.
Aseahawkfan wrote:Tyson is known for their frozen food, so not sure that is true. I would have to see. I know they sell a lot of frozen chicken foods.
Frozen meat and poultry isn't a problem, at least not yet. They have sufficient supplies in frozen warehouses. The problem is fresh meats. The pipeline for fresh meat is pretty delicately balanced, and the link you shared showed the effects of a relatively small bottleneck in the pipeline. With such a short shelf life, it has to be finely tuned to match a predictable demand. The same is true with dairy products like fresh milk and eggs, fresh vegetables, etc. Disrupt the supply chain and you get almost immediate shortages. Remember last year when romaine lettuce that had to be pulled off the shelves due to E. coli? That was due to an outbreak in just one growing region, yet you couldn't get a Caesar salad for weeks.
I've worked in the vegetable processing industry for 40 years and worked with many friends and former employees that have worked at a nearby meat packing plant that I've referenced. Meat and poultry processing are a lot different in that they employ 2-3 times the numbers we do and work in much more confined spaces closer to other workers. My former employer reports that they've been able to keep operating but have had to shut some plants down occasionally when they've had an employee test positive. One of my friends from work is under quarantine at this time. It's a challenge for them to operate, but they're doing it. The meat packing plant, on the other hand, has had 126 positive tests and counting. They've shut down and vowed to test every one of their 1400 employees.
Aseahawkfan wrote:If Trump wants to keep them open, he better step the testing support up. I wonder if the Idgit understands that is why we need more testing.
Yep. Testing and contact tracing.
Canned, packaged, frozen, and other processed foods have much higher inventories and can absorb the added demand, at least for a period of time. We may see shortages of certain types of food in certain locations, but we're not going to go hungry. Hoarders are a bigger threat. They may have to go to a rationing system like they did during WW2, but we're not going to starve.
Aseahawkfan wrote:I hope we don't starve. I don't want everything shutting down as a knee jerk reaction every time we get an outbreak. From what I understand and as you've stated, food processing is very labor intensive. And we do use a lot of immigrant labor. Trump. Trump better get some money support going to keep the food industry going including testing support. This guy is irritating the hell out of me. How much of our support stimulus and testing is going to food and healthcare? The Lakers are taking a loan? What is that?
The food industry isn't in trouble, at least not yet. Meat packing is perhaps the most labor intensive business in food processing. Even my facilities, which I initially thought it was crazy for them to operate, seem to be managing OK with the protocols they've put in place. They've had to shut down a few of them for several days due to positive tests, but nothing like what's going on in the fresh meat and poultry industry.. Our plants are only about 1/2 or 1/3 the number of workers as Tyson has.
I find it ironic that the POTUS considers these workers so essential that he's using the DPA to order them back to work. Most of these workers are low paid, entry level immigrants and minorities. If you read the article I liked, there are 11 different languages spoken in that one plant. Some may be undocumented. Agricultural work is even more heavily laden with immigrants and have a higher percentage of illegals amongst the workforce. If we do have a genuine food shortage, the plight of those workers and how they are treated will come to light, and it's not going to favor the POTUS as he's spent the past 4 years demonizing them. He's opening up a can of worms that Biden can exploit in the fall.
Aseahawkfan wrote:Yeah. pretty stupid. Just more of the hypocrisy that permeates our society in regards to immigrants. Great to have when you need them, easy targets to attack to get some easy votes from the racist, dumb group of Americans that don't bother to spend much time looking into things.
I don't mean to suggest that I have some ultimate understanding of immigrants as there's a lot that I don't know, but I wish others had a chance to experience them from the same viewpoint which I have. People fear most what they understand least, and way too many don't understand people from other cultures. I suspect it is the same in other countries as well.