We go through a lot of food everyday, how do we do that? How do we have enough food for billions of people to eat everyday? What are some of the problems that the supply chain faces these day? (Feel free to expand on any other questions too!)
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so you have lots off people making food.(growing crops. farming animals etc.) these people deliver the food to distributors. which move food around so we have loots of variety. then they deliver it to shops and people buy and cook it
but I think you mean how can we organize it. so if a place has to much food the market selling them notices the surplus and demands less resupply from the distributors. electivly ordering less food for the future. this is why if there is suddenly a big demand it gets out of stock till the deitributor can react. if a big area has a shortage the distributor of that area gets out of stock and he has to go to the distributor network ordering larger summes on the world market.
this is normaly called pull logistics. a helping factor is if you have less of something you sell it for more money so that it is less likely to be bought. making it more resilient to go out of stock.
the opposite is also the case and far more frequent in developed worlds because our shops have to much on hand normaly. if you have a surpluses you lower prices what we experience as sales.
so all in all shops pull what they think they need and order more if there is a bigger demand this will automatically regulate to what we call the free market.(basically swarm intelligence)
Mostly with “staples”. These are crops that are easy to grow and store and deliver a large amount of energy. Rice, wheat, lentils, corn, soy, potatoes, etc. Rice is the MVP of staples and part of why so many people live in East Asia.
Compared to staples, the whole rest of agriculture is ornamental. Meat, dairy, fruits, green vegetables, etc. are tasty and contain important nutrients, but you can get surprisingly far on staples alone if you have to. Even in the modern Western diet, staples sneak in as breads for sandwiches, the base of a rice bowl, or a side of fried potatoes.
A huge percentage of the people on earth work in agriculture
According to the world bank number it was 28% of Earth’s employed population in 2018. That is 1 billion people. So we talk about 1 in 8 humans working to produce food.
The percentage has dropped over time it was 44% back in 1991 and the further you go back the larger percentage it is. This is because of the mechanization of agriculture. In 1800 we talk about 90% of Earth’s population was farmers.
The percentage is not the same in all countries for the US the number is around 1% because of the high level of mechanization.
This number is only for growing food and raising animals. The number does not include the people that make tractors and other equipment used in farming. The equipment needs fuel and service to be used. The food also needs to be transported and sold to the consumer.
I am not sure to what degree it includes people that process the food like butchers etc. I am quite sure that the number does not include people that work in a restaurant but might include people in some food processing plants. But the point is there are more people that are involved in the process that brings food to you than the ones that do the direct farming.
So we have enough food because the work of a huge amount of people is directly or indirectly involved in the feeding of Earth’s population
I am not sure to what degree it includes people that process the food like butchers etc. I am quite sure that the number does not include people that work in a restaurant but might include people in some food processing plants. But the point is there are more people that are involved in the process that brings food to you than the ones that directly grow it.
The main reason that we have enough food (for now) for everyone:
Nitrogen.
Plants require nitrogen from the soil to grow properly, and as we grow plants in soil they deplete that nitrogen. So eventually the soil can’t support healthy plants.
Although the Earth’s atmosphere is just under 80% nitrogen, plants can’t use this form of it. They need it in the soil and to absorb it in a specific manner. Once this was discovered, we went to work finding sources for nitrogen fertilizers that would allow us to grow healthy crops and more of them.
For a long time, this was in the form of bird and bat guano- entire islands that had been bird/bat roosting and nesting sites for millennia became one of the most important resources in the world. They were so critical that there was (still is!) a United States law that allows any US citizen to lay claim to any unclaimed island containing guano deposits- and to be backed by the US military in that claim. (The Guano Islands Act of 1856).
Prior to humans being able to create nitrogen in a form plants could use, we would have enough food to feed less than half the current global population. Guano was being depleted faster than it was being replenished and chemists worked for years to find ways to synthesize ammonia- which is made of nitrogen and hydrogen, but the nitrogen in a form that plants can use instead of the atmospheric version. Once that process was perfected, global food production skyrocketed.
Without nitrogen fertilizer, well over half of humanity would not exist.
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