The Rice Shortage?

Just a quick update following my rebuttal of a recent New Yorker article on the coming collapse of the world's food system.

Remember all those media articles about rice shortages just a scant two months ago? Since then, in my grocery store in suburban New Jersey, there were signs posted next to the rice warning that customers could buy only two 20 pound bags of rice at a time because of these shortages.

I just have to tell everyone that yesterday we saw those signs replaced by a 50% off sale on--you guessed it--20 pound bags of rice.

It seems some systems can become recursive in very short order.

Now that rice is two for the price of one, we discovered that we couldn't even carry two 20 pound bags out of the store at one time.