Sometimes when I listen to NPR I think the people on the radio are joking, this is mostly during  Fresh Air, but the time I know they are serious is when they are talking about food shortages.  The last time I had a conversation about food shortages it was during the fourth grade science fair in which my neighbor made a project called “the food chain”.  The conversation we had was mostly about how he basically covered a piece of cardboard with green spray paint, and then covered with various plastic farm animals and action figures, but his father did say something about humans being at the top “for a reason”.   The project did not receive high marks for creativity, but since it was in the same fair with a project called “multiplication”, which was basically a kid demonstrating how to do multiplication by grouping various pieces of fruit together, it was well received.

I realize that talk of food shortages makes a person’s head spin much like talking about God, or the galaxy, or competitive cycling, but I’m going to try to make sense of it anyway. Basically, the world works like this: In some place like Utah or Nebraska, there is a lot of corn growing.  This corn can either be made into things like chips or pig feed or it can be made into a corn maze.  If it is made into a corn maze, people can still eat it, but other people get to have a lot of fun in it first, which makes it better than just regular corn.  In some places like England, the only land big enough to grow anything is owned by Ozzie Osborne or Eric Clapton, so they also rely on things that are grown in Spain and Portugal and Greece, but since the people in those countries are always going on strike, they mostly just eat eggs and skuzzy-looking hamburgers and things involving ketchup and gravy.

In general, the food chain works about the same in every place except in America, where a huge portion of the population who were upper middle class to wealthy in or about 2007-2010, suddenly became very allergic to gluten, which they believed was some of the reason their children didn’t get into Brown.  Additionally, we’ve got vegans who eat mostly string and bark, and loads of vegetarians who mostly just eat vegetables but who also trick fish into swimming close enough to be eaten because some fish don’t know they are covered by the definition and some don’t know they are made out of meat.

The reason people in the developed world worry about food shortages is because for a very long time there have been major food shortages in other places, such as Africa.  There are a lot of reasons why this is the case but mostly it was because Sean Penn was too busy starring in “Fast Times as Ridgemont High” to do much about it and Bono only recently became famous enough to turn his sunglasses into wheat.  Confusingly, also during that same time, the governments of America and Britain were buying huge quantities of food from local farmers and setting it on fire and burying it in the ground, which they said had something to do with keeping prices fair and ensuring adequate levels of production.  Upon hearing about these mountains of food being wasted, every economics student in the world has asked his professor why the food could not have been shared with people who needed it.  Not all economists agree about why the food had to be ruined instead of shared but made something up because they couldn’t think of a good reason, and the rest are pretty sure it had something to do with a concert put on by John Mellencamp and Willie Nelson.

The real fear, as I understand it, is that eventually most of the people in China will have cars, which will make it easier for them to go out to eat, which will cause us to either run out of meat, or run out of corn, both of which will make it hard to make decent nachos.  According to the people on NPR the food shortage is not imminent, but could threaten to shorten its pledge drive to 40 days a year if some serious measures aren’t taken.

If you’re not worried about a food shortage, odds are you don’t do the food shopping for your family, or you’ve never tried to purchase an avocado, which requires either a donation of blood plasma, or in my case, waiting until your mother-in-law buys them for you.  For those of you who are scared at the prospect of the price of food rising uncontrollably, hang tight, I know I haven’t been too helpful yet but as soon as my neighbor finishes attaching coins to his diorama entitled “inflation” I’ll be the first to share what I’ve learned.