With so many people in the world how do we always have enough/“enough” livestock and produce to feed everyone?
In: Biology
Its all about supply chain management. Lets take your NYC grocery store example, and run with that.
There’s a person at that grocery store that looks at what people buy, and what people will buy, and what people want to buy. His job is to figure out what people will pay for that item, and how much they’ll buy. He then goes to the suppliers that sell that particular item to the store, and starts placing orders for future delivery.
The supplier has someone doing a very similar job, buying things like meat from slaughterhouses in huge quantities for future order.
The slaughterhouse has a similar person and process in place determining how many cows or pigs to buy from the industrial ranches that raise them.
When demand for meat products is on the rise, those industrial ranches will produce more animals to be sold, or raise the prices on their animals to balance the demand. If demand gets to be so much that they can’t meet it, new industrial ranches will open up to start selling, or prices will rise to the point that not as many people buy meat.
We don’t have enough of any one particular thing to feed everyone. Fortunately, not everyone eats the same thing worldwide. Some cultures have a fish centric diet, some have a pork centric diet, some are more plant based, etc. If everyone had the exact same diet we would not be able to sustain it with livestock products easily.
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