Donald Trump surprised many by winning the US presidential election in a landslide this past week. Critics have predicted economic and social chaos will ensue. Millions in his country are already on the verge of starvation. Will Trump address the food price crisis?
We posted earlier this week about the lay of the land now that Donald Trump has won four more years in the White House. Observers across the foodsphere are panicking that Trump hasn’t even really acknowledged there’s a food price crisis, much less promised to ‘fix’ it…
A ‘clear and present danger’
The president-elect was extremely vocal – sometimes frighteningly so – about issues such as immi-gration, the border, the economy, fertility and other so-called ‘hot-buttons’ during his election cam-paign. But he never even got close to addressing the food price crisis.
As they love to quote in the movies and spy novels… Unrelenting high food prices remain a ‘clear and present danger’ to millions of Americans. Millions of those low-income earners, fixed-income seniors, and recently-arrived immigrants are having real trouble affording decent food.
Desperate measures
‘They’ also say, ‘desperate times call for desperate measures’. But Trump apparently hasn’t prioritized ANY measures to make decent, nutritious food more affordable for a growing majority of Americans.
That’s led to some serious collateral issues – such as a rise in sales of junk and processed foods. They’re cheaper and more filling than ‘cleaner’, more nourishing foods. But given that they now make up 60 percent or more of the average American’s diet, the situation has become critical.
Obesity a crisis of its own
Almost 75 percent of Americans – 3 out of every 4 – are now overweight or obese. And the burden on the US health care system to treat those conditions and the more serious diseases they lead to has become crushing. Heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, immune system deficiencies and other chronic conditions are spiralling out of control.
This is neither the time nor place to get into a discussion of what officials should – much less ‘must’ – do about food prices. The message here is basic: People at the lowest level of the income ladder across the Western world are literally looking starvation in the face – every time they glance in a mirror.
Educated guesses…
We might be able to make some educated guesses about what Trump understands or believes about the food price situation…
My first thought was, he may have dismissed the issue as something that will go away by itself after he deports the 20 million ‘alien leeches’ he says have ‘invaded’ his country over Biden/Harris’ so-called ‘open’ southern border.
His reasoning? All the more food to go around. The less competition there is for the available food, he may naively think, the lower prices will ‘naturally’ be. But the logic behind that simplistic view has already been shown to be just as faulty as the reasoning behind ‘trickle-down’ economics.
Compounding lies and misinformation
There’s an even more more dangerous parallel crisis at hand. Trump has convinced millions of his supporters that climate change is a hoax. In spite of the annual increases in drought, record high temperatures, wildfires, and the storms that accompany such weather. The contiguous 48 US states have never seen such weather in living memory. And it’s expected to get nothing but worse.
Crop failures are already being reported. Foods that were common and cheap just a few years ago – such as animal-source proteins – are rapidly becoming unsustainable luxuries. Fresh fruits and veg-gies we eat straight from the fields, rather than running them through animals to make meat, are already soaring in price and becoming less sustainable.
And that, too, is a crisis of it’s own. Fresh produce is considered essential to preserving our health and well being. It’s been proven over and over that we cannot live by supplements alone. The human body simply can’t absorb nutrients from pills and concentrates as efficiently as it does from fresh, natural sources.
My take
It’s more than abundantly clear that the incoming Trump administration has huge challenges on its hands in multiple, dovetailing essential sectors. Everyone in the Western World must learn to cope with the climate. Governments must help agriculture evolve to a new plant-based model, help the food supply chain adjust accordingly, and help consumers embrace the unavoidable realities all those changes imply.
But it appears Trump doesn’t even have ‘a concept of a plan’ to address the coming Great Shift.
My questions to you:
Do you think Trump even understands what the world – including relatively wealthy, developed nations such as the US – are up against as a result of climate change?
Do you think he understands that there’s a very real food price crisis in play right now?
You think he realizes there are real shortages of some foods right now? And that they’re just going to get worse?
Or do you think the food crisis is not going to become ‘real’ to him until his beloved Big Mac and Diet Coke become literally unavailable? Due to sustainability issues and the ultimate crash of Fast Food culture as we know it?
Trump and his billionaire cronies will be the last to be confronted by the realities of the foodsphere crisis. But by then – will it be too late for the rest of us?
Muse on that…
~ Maggie J.