I'm currently doing a literature review for a research project closely related to this exact topic. And they say reading HN is a waste of time! ;)
But seriously. This is a great example of what a lot of other research also points to: the growing vulnerability of the US food system to systemic existential risks due to geographic specialization, market consolidation, and decrease in network resilience of local food systems. This is important stuff. Glad to see food systems pop up here.
Absolutely. But that's the not box to think in to see the problem. Sure, we haven't had that happen in recent memory. Soooo... if there were to be a problem then, that means it wouldn't look what like we think "food problems" should look like. What we see doesn't determine the problem space, the problem space suggests ways we may need to change our viewing angle.
By the time you're responding to a catastrophe there have already been system level changes happening for quite some time before that kind of observable "phase transition" from normal function to disaster even occurs.
We've gotten increasingly better at producing a particular type of highly optimized food and distributing it through just as optimized Just in Time/LEAN systems. Which is great and allows you to carry less "inventory waste" - we've managed to get down to now keeping about 75 days worth of food reserves globally - HOWEVER, the trade off to that type of efficiency is that introduces new sources of risk. It (by definition) removes a ton of redundancy from the system and severely decreases the resilience of the total system to any sort of shock - let along multiple coincident ones.
THAT then brings in our outdated ways of conceptualizing, preparing for, and mitigating risks across functional and geographic areas. If you're dealing with an issue as complicated the global food system it's not productive to just have individual risk calculations with insurance/consumer pricing baked in for individual scenarios. For example, in any particular area there may be an x% chance of a 1000 year flood. So if there are 5000 of those communities and the total system would have been able to withstand some number of 1000 year floods distributed between them in a normal year, what happens when you factor in that, for instance, our climate "context" is different than when lots of infrastructure was built? What's the ability of the system to withstand the normal amount of thousand year floods when you add in climate effects that may both cause more events and make each event more severe/destructive and there also happens to be a "bad year"/5-10% reduction in (mostly monoculture) cereal crop output or a case of African swine fever that kills 300 million pigs in China. Now factor in the systemic changes and consolidation leading to less redundancy in the food system and you've got a hard risk management problem on your hands.
But seriously. This is a great example of what a lot of other research also points to: the growing vulnerability of the US food system to systemic existential risks due to geographic specialization, market consolidation, and decrease in network resilience of local food systems. This is important stuff. Glad to see food systems pop up here.