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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32574 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023

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What's unsustainable about any of these foods? I can and have grown almost all of them including mushrooms?

He means that in a situation of economic decline and political turmoil, times you can reasonably expect following the defeat of the United States in WW3 and the end of the dollar as a reserve currency, you won't be able to get all the fancy things you eat to have a nutritionally complete diet.

Meanwhile, he'd probably be fine unless times got really tough.

I think that in a situation of deep economic decline when the US gov can no longer subsidize its farmers it's meat that will get radically more expensive. The US already produces its own soybeans and corn, and they are mostly used for animal feed and industrial purposes. Remove the subsidies, and corn-fed beef and soy-fed chicken will become too expensive for daily consumption.

Counterpoint- Argentina has experienced deep economic decline and continues to heavily subsidize meat production, to the point of having among the world’s highest per capita consumption of (normally very expensive) red meat despite being slightly poorer than Mexico.

Yes, but we don't usually associate countries south of the Border with making particulary-smart economic decisions. Granted, maybe Argentinians really can't go without the amount of meat the currently consume and, as your comment seems to imply, they are making do regardless of the strains elsewhere.

I don’t expect a politically tumultuous US to be making particularly smart economic decisions.

I really, really doubt that's the case.

Americans pay very little for food compared to their incomes.

Note the blood red countries that are much poorer, such as Poland, Czech Republic etc.

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Who do you think is paying those subsidies now?

If you mean that the biggest source of federal revenue is individual income taxes, then people will still be paying them, they just won't go to the farmers.

So you're positing a world where the US Federal Government can no longer subsidize farmers, but will still be collecting all the taxes it used to use to subsidize them? Seems to me that the "deep economic decline" is doing all the work there; it's not that farmers are subsidized (and note that Federal involvement with farmers often pushes the price up, as with price supports, rather than just down) but that the US is wealthy.

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