An excellent and incredibly long essay on the fragilities of the US food system by Madge Waggy. About a 30 minute read, 45 minutes if you stop and think while reading it.
Rather than repeat the whole catalogue (of potential failure points), four things are worth holding in mind, because they are where the pressures actually meet:
- The system has very little stored reserve, so a delay anywhere turns into a shortage somewhere else.
- The most critical nodes, from packing plants to ports, are few enough that one failure travels nationally.
- The natural base, meaning water and soil, is degrading slowly and unevenly, with the damage concentrated in the regions that produce the most.
- The public has little reserve and adapts quickly, which delays any political pressure to fix the problem.
The point of gathering them is not to list ten separate troubles but to show one system with several places it can give.
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What would make the biggest difference is probably the least glamorous thing, which is treating resilience as something worth paying for in advance rather than regretting in hindsight. That means valuing the buffer, the spare plant, the local mill, the cover crop, and the extra warehouse, even when they look inefficient in a good year. It means measuring the system not by how cheaply it runs in calm weather but by how gracefully it fails in bad weather.
The hardest part is that resilience has no constituency. It has no ribbon-cutting, no dramatic rescue, no visible hero.
Disclosure: Some of the "stock phrasing" suggests that AI might have assisted in the writing of this essay.
Resilience also doesn't have a discernable ROI in the near term, which makes it difficult to get investor $$ for it. Accountants hate paying for redundancy as they'd rather pay someone to fix it than have a backup.
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