Indeed. Before COVID, Tempo would have a couple of eggs for breakfast. Then he got that sweet sweet stimulus money and then he would sit down and eat 50 eggs!
America has an epidemic of obesity, in the best of times we eat way too much food. Then you posit that suddenly there is this stimulus and we eat MORE food?
I’ve covered this I don’t know how many times. The markets tend to right size themselves to supply chains and vice versa over time. Then we go and shut down chunks of the supply chain due to COVID, some processing plants mysteriously blow up, maybe we get an avian flu, and then we throw gasoline on the fire by printing trillions of dollars, some of which ends up in the hands of families and individuals; even more which ends up going to corporations in one of the largest scams in history.
Now the centralized food processors have trillions of reasons to collude with each other to keep the party going so they throttle supply and keep demand even more artificially high than it already was. (Same exact thing happens to farming inputs when commodity prices go up—the price of every farming input magically goes right up with the markets then stays high for a while then comes back down with commodity prices)
Then the all-inclusive resorts and cruise ships and restaurants and everything else opens back up and food waste returns to normal.
Families have an abundance of cash and pent up demand which puts pressure on the housing market and start overpaying for regular vehicles etc.
That cash runs out eventually for many of them and they realize all their staple foods have gone way up so they start eating less healthy food and eat more processed grain based crap and get even fatter. The healthier whole foods stay high because people doing well are still willing to pay for them and the market is more easily controlled.
Assuming adequate supply, the price eventually will creep back down for most staple foods because they’re abundant and cheap and even the top heavy processing businesses can’t get rid of more food than people can eat. Beef may be an exception—I don’t think I’ll ever see it “cheap” again in my lifetime. (Which is sad to me because it’s delicious and one of our most nutrient dense foods, but cattle farming is under large scale attack from multiple angles.)
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People use modern day food stamps to buy more soda than anything else. The food pyramid that was rolled out 40 some years ago is pretty much the same diet we use to fatten animals for slaughter.
I can understand the argument that food is too cheap, but I’m more inclined to believe that the true problem with obesity in this country is lack of affordable healthy options, lack of education, and increasingly sedentary lifestyle.
I heard recently that something like 33% of kids under 18 are prediabetic. Maybe it’s a matter of time before junk food gets the tobacco treatment—if it got half the pushback the beef industry gets we might actually get through to people. And why the hell can people buy soda and Doritos with EBT? Corn lobby isn’t the only reason.
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