Food Hoarding and Iowa's Future

[Editor's
Note: This is the third article in a Blog for Iowa series about food
and food pricing in Iowa, centered around a comparison shopping trip to
buy ingredients for a bowl of vegetarian chili. Read the previous articles
by clicking here or here].

An Iowan recently wrote that we should be stockpiling food for the apocalypse. Heaven help us if there is a food shortage in the United States and the government steps in to direct who gets food and who doesn’t. It could happen! The writer advises us to pick up shelf stable, dehydrated meals, canned soup, rice and macaroni and cheese so that if anarchy reigns, at least those closest to us will have something to eat. And thank goodness for the second amendment so the food cache can be defended from hungry predators. Poppycock!

When we consider food security, an alternative to the WIIFM (What’s In It for Me?) culture is to look to what could cause dramatic food shortages. Things like a regional nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India. Yes, we may need to think about what is going on in the world beyond Iowa’s borders, and I don’t mean Missouri. We should reduce stockpiles of nuclear weapons and encourage other nations to do likewise. A regional nuclear war with an exchange of as few as fifty or a hundred Hiroshima sized warheads could lower temperatures and reduce precipitation so as to disrupt growing cycles around the world. It could cause hundreds of millions of deaths from starvation. Hoarding enough food to survive this kind of cataclysm would be difficult. We should make a choice: nuclear abolition or annihilation. You can learn more about nuclear famine here.

If this scenario is too scary, try this one.

Leonard Fletcher Parker was a 19th Century Iowa educator who wrote about providing for a family on a few acres, “From apples, wool, and stock the family must get money enough to pay taxes and interest, buy what was necessary for maintenance, and save some to wipe out existing debt. This was hard to do.” Each passing decade we move further from Parker’s agrarian individualism. Last fall, one of my octogenarian friends said he raised a family on a hundred acres but with commodity prices so low and industrial agriculture so capital intensive, he couldn’t do it now. As the 2010 U.S. Census indicated, Iowans continue to move from rural areas, where there was at least a chance of providing sustenance for a family.

We have become reliant on the work of others for our food, so it is easy to understand the fears of urban dwellers about shortages and high prices. Our budgets are stretched tight and there is little extra money to save or pay down debt as Parker did. At the same time, hoarding is a selfish answer to our food security concerns and it tears at the fabric of society.

Whether our politics are similar or not, whether we like it or not, we are all in this together and will sink or swim… together. The sooner we set aside the false partisanship that prevents our society from solving big problems, the better off we will be.

Yes, we should keep some extra food around the house if we can. But should the apocalypse come, we should also be ready to share what we have with our neighbors for as long as it lasts, recognizing that if we get to that place, society’s survival may already be at risk and an intrusive government will not be the problem or have the ability to save us.

~Paul Deaton is a native Iowan living in rural Johnson County and weekend editor of Blog for Iowa. E-mail Paul Deaton