The American Food Shortage You Knew Nothing About

Off the Grid News – by Daniel Jennings

The United States simply is not growing enough vegetables to meet its needs, data collected by the USDA’s Economic Research Service indicates.

Around 1.65 cups of vegetables were available per person per day in the United States in 2013, even though dietary guidelines recommend a person consume 2.5 to 3 cups of vegetables a day, NPR reported, using government data.  

Even worse, the supply of vegetables in the United States has been falling since 2000. The amount of vegetables available per day to average Americans peaked at around 1.80 cups around the turn of the 21St Century. Since then, the supply of vegetables in the nation has decreased by around 15 percent, falling to 1.65 cups by 2013 (the latest year for which data is available). The USDA’s count includes both imported and homegrown produce available for commercial sale.

Around 50 percent of the vegetables currently available in the United States are potatoes and tomatoes, and most people consume those in unhealthy forms such as ketchup, French fries and pizza, the report said. The third most common vegetable was lettuce.

“What I see here with lots of potatoes, tomatoes and lettuce … [is] that people are used to these items, and habits are hard to break,” Lindsey Haynes Maslow of the Union of Concerned Scientists told the radio network.

Dietary guidelines recommend eating a variety of vegetables.

The report also found that 87 percent of American adults failed to eat the recommended amount of vegetables between 2007 and 2010, according to recent CDC data. In Mississippi, only 5.5 of people ate enough vegetables and in California 13 percent did so.

The United States vegetable supply would have to increase by 70 percent if every American started following the USDA’s dietary guidelines, NPR reported.

“We have a serious disconnect between agriculture and health policy in our country,” Marion Nestle, a nutrition researcher at New York University, told NPR. “The USDA does not support ‘specialty crops’ [such as vegetables] to any appreciable extent and the Department of Commerce’s figures show that the relative price of fruits and vegetables has gone up much faster than that of fast food or sodas.”

The government tells people to eat healthy food but is subsidizing other crops – such as corn and soybeans – “that end up in cheaper, less healthy processed food,” NPR said.

It looks as if those who want their families to eat healthy will have to grow a garden. If present trends continue, your garden could be the only supply of affordable vegetables your family has.

http://www.offthegridnews.com/current-events/the-american-food-shortage-you-knew-nothing-about/

6 thoughts on “The American Food Shortage You Knew Nothing About

  1. And there will be even less thanks to the regulation of the feral government and their FDA and USDA
    This grower will remove the 45,000# of greens he grows per year rather than submit to further regulation,

    Tough shit!
    Eat sand!

  2. Kulafarmer,
    Seriously? Please expand on this. I’m not being sarcastic. Which new regs are affecting your planning? I have a friend in the pecan business who retired because of the regs following the peanut-salmonella event. The regs applied to all nuts, were expensive and reduced the food value of the produce through mandatory boiling and heat drying.

  3. Maybe folks are eating less vegetables and fruits because they know or they assume these vegetables and fruits are GMO, maybe? And organic fruits and veggies are either too expensive or too hard to find? Maybe? Despite the huge demand for organic…

    1. I haven’t eaten corn in years, DL.

      And I’m sure you’ve noticed they’re killing the country’s best vegetable-producing region – CA.

  4. The Government shut down hundreds of farms out west. Many shut down by drought and water shortages and possible NOW RADIATION FROM FUKUSHIMA. No one has checked radiation levels the Pacific sea life is dying too

    Mark

  5. Most U.S. food comes from California, where the “man made drought”
    has been progressing for a few years now.

    Between the “silent war” of “chemical saturation” of our planet, the drought, and radiation contamination, all life on this planet is already doomed.

    Too many people asleep for far too long.

    Now, it’s only a matter of time.

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