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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

> Three percent chance coronavirus will kill us. One hundred percent chance not having any food will kill us.

Is keeping meat processing plants closed really going to cause food shortages? Eating rice and beans isn't pleasant, but comparing it to starvation is hyperbolic.

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The rice and beans that are in the supply chain now were planted several months ago, based on projected demand when they were planted. These supply chains are all interconnected.

At scale, we can't necessarily just substitute things instantly like that. Do you think there's enough calorie-slack built into the rice & beans (& everything else) to supply the drop from animal sources? 'Cause I for one would be very, very surprised.

Not to mention you're also assuming that rice and beans are unaffected... but very little if anything about these plant closures are specifically related to them being animal protein sources. Does no good to shrug and say "people should just be eating vegetarian anyhow" if the vegetarian supply line is also going to collapse.

To expand on your point, even if the vegetarian protien supply chains aren't directly affected by COVID the way that the meat supply chain is, if everyone who eats meat must abruptly switch to alternative protein sources, do we imagine that there is an overproduction of such protein sources such that it can absorb the demand without driving prices out of reach of the poor?

>Do you think there's enough calorie-slack built into the rice & beans (& everything else) to supply the drop from animal sources? 'Cause I for one would be very, very surprised.

Rice and beans is probably not the best example, it's just the stereotypical frugal food. What's more realistic would be corn and soybeans. Massive amounts of corn is used for ethanol production (which we probably don't need since oil is at an all time low), and massive amounts of soybeans is used for meat production (which we don't need because all the meat processing plants are shut down).

FWIW the corn fed to livestock or used for ethanol is usually field corn, which is generally considered inedible for humans. We eat sweet corn, which is only a tiny fraction of the USA corn crop.

I'm pretty sure that field corn is perfectly edible for humans. The problem is that it doesn't taste as good as sweet corn, but it's not poisonous or anything. In fact, if you're starving, it probably tastes pretty good.

Edible in the same sense as paper is technically edible, yes. Nutritionally valuable to humans? Only for a brief window — and with commercial processing, so we're back to "what if the food processing part of the chain fails due to the pandemic?"

>Edible in the same sense as paper is technically edible, yes. Nutritionally valuable to humans? Only for a brief window

Can you elaborate on that? It's not like you're eating leaves. Aren't all types of corn mostly starch that humans can digest?

From Wikipedia:

> Although not grown primarily for human consumption, people do pick ears of field corn when its sugar content has peaked and cook it on the cob or eat it raw. Ears of field corn picked and consumed in this manner are commonly called "roasting ears" due to the most commonly used method of cooking them.

So: Only in a brief window? Maybe, though I doubt it. (Unless you're trying to say that, in the form of corn on the cob, it won't keep for all that long, which is true.) With commercial processing? Hardly. (Unless you are trying to say that we can't, say, can it or freeze it in quantity without commercial processing, which is true.)

All that said, people would happily eat field corn on the cob if it meant that they got to eat. It may not be the whole answer to a food shortage, but it's an answer that could help a significant amount.

Unfortunately, I'm relatively sure that field corn isn't harvested the same way as sweet corn, and so there might not be a way to collect those cobs before they dry.

You are correct. Field corn is (usually) harvested by a giant combine harvester and shucked/processed automatically in the machine, with the kernels dumped into a waiting truck parked alongside. Then it's stored in grain elevators for days, weeks, or months until it's processed for fuel or feed.

Sweet corn is (usually) picked by hand on a much smaller scale, left in its natural leafy husk, and transported for retail sale within a week or two.

It's a whole different ball game. I'm sure we COULD take big portions of our feed/fuel field corn and grind it into human-ready cornmeal for mush and cornbread, but it wouldn't be a walk in the park :-/

The corn used for ethanol production isn't the human-edible sweet corn though. Wrong plant.

Dent corn is still edible, it just needs to be nixtamalized first to unlock more of the nutrients. [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixtamalization

True, but nixtamilization isn't used at the scales needed for this, we'd need to build new processing plants. That'd probably take about as long as just growing new sweet corn instead.

In the depths of World War II Britain, where food was extremely short, civilians were given a weekly ration of about a pound of meat and half a pound of bacon. (For comparison, modern Americans eat about 2 pounds of meat a week, which I think includes bacon.)

For better or worse, meat is considered an essential food. It would be disastrously, apocalyptically bad if it becomes unavailable.

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