For once we're going to take The Guardian's advice

The Guardian tells us that the current troubles mean we should think about food, where it comes from, how, what we might do about all of that:

The Guardian view on the future of farming: let’s think about food

Editorial

The British food system, as well as individuals’ diets, needs to be balanced. Price is not the only factor

Entirely true that price is not the only factor, it never is and never has been. The aim of having an economy at all, let alone an economic policy, is to maximise human utility. Price will of course be an influence here, possibly a dominant one, but never the only.

As it happens the same edition of the same newspaper warns that the country might be running out of tinned tomatoes:

Suppliers ration stocks of tinned tomatoes after surge in demand

“Ration” is a bit extreme as a description, warn that the supply is not infinite perhaps:

Italian tomatoes make up about three-quarters of UK stocks, according to the Grocer trade journal, and are canned between June and September.

Diego Pariotti, the head of export at Conserve Italia, which owns the Cirio tinned tomato brand, said it could meet usual order levels but not “crazy demand”. He added they had told customers: “If you don’t start calming the fever we won’t get to the next crop.”

....

McDiarmid said: “It’s a seasonal crop. It’s finite. What was picked last year is what was picked and that’s all there is until 2020 harvest. We can’t bring forward the harvest.”

Which is a useful education in how things used to be. The Hungry Times were not in winter, they were in June and July. It is just before the next harvest that the supplies from the year before are in danger of running out. It is the weeks just before the fleets of combine harvesters sweep through the fields of golden grain that bread is in short supply.

With tomatoes there is added detail. It’s possible to hothouse them in the UK but as Adam Smith said about wine in Scotland it’s easier - consumes fewer resources - to get the product shipped in from where it grows freely under the Sun. Spain - largely employing a different cultivar - ships us fresh tomatoes, Italy these canned being talked about.

So, thinking about farming and food, what should we do about this? Clearly, we should be maximising the number of different harvests that we gain our supplies from. The best method of gaining copious year round edibles being to ship in from places that pick and process across the calendar rather than being reliant upon just the one event a year. Southern Hemisphere farms, for example, might well be canning tomatoes in the January to March window to match that July to September in Italy. Which would neatly cover any possible shortages in May and June, wouldn’t it?

We have indeed done what The Guardian advises, thought about food and farming. We desire more globalisation and free trade in food. Not that we expect The Guardian to come to the same conclusion, despite its origin as a paper campaigning against the Corn Laws, but we can hope, right?