What can an average JOE do to face the global food crisis?

[Lucius]

I think chickens might be a good option. They can feed on termites, insects and other random things found in the environment. And produce a decent number of eggs every week.

You need space to keep chickens, this is by no means something you can do in cities, and in my specific case keeping anything other than pets is prohibited by law. Furthermore, chickens will certainly not be very productive in laying eggs if they are not provided with additional nutrition, which means that you need at least corn and grain as additional nutrition.

What may still be a problem are the diseases that prevail among birds, and if you keep chickens outdoors they are exposed to bird flu. So while it may seem easy, from the experience of some people I know personally, not everything is as simple as it seems.

[sayaya17]

We started reading more reports that talk about the possibility of a global food crisis, especially in poor countries.

• https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/05/18/world-bank-announces-planned-actions-for-global-food-crisis-response
• https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/may/22/britain-slashes-humanitarian-aid-by-51-despite-global-food-crisis
• https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/food-crisis-ukraine-war-1.6460194
• https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-61503049

Supply chain problems, war, inflation, fertilizers will set fire to the already high food prices.

What can the average middle-class person do to protect themselves from food problems?
Will buying more food and storing it solve the problem, or trying to start farming or investing and trying to increase his money to buy food at any price? Or what?

I live in a country where people still find it difficult to buy food, in addition to the ever-increasing price of food. The problem is finding a job
nowadays is getting more and more difficult, especially with the pandemic, many companies in my country are  reducing their employees.
This ultimately makes the crime rate increase, because many people are looking for ways to survive, even if the way is against the law.

Regarding your question for the average middle class person how do they fulfill their basic needs to buy food. Usually for people who have
a large enough land, of course they choose farming and gardening, in addition to being able to meet their daily food needs. If there is still
some left over from the harvest, we can usually sell it to the market to make money. But for me who lives in a big city, where land prices
are very expensive, so it is not possible to buy land for farming and gardening. Then hoarding food in large quantities is not a good solution,
because often hoarding too much food, will only make the quality of the food decrease. The most effective way is that we use technology to
make money, so we can buy food at any price.

If we are diligent in digging for information on the internet, there are lots of opportunities to be able to make money. So I think it's better to
work hard to earn money, so we can buy food, and I've also learned not to over-buy food. So that the money we make doesn't all go to food,
and we can still invest in crypto for our retirement plans.

[cabron]

We started reading more reports that talk about the possibility of a global food crisis, especially in poor countries.

• https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/05/18/world-bank-announces-planned-actions-for-global-food-crisis-response
• https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/may/22/britain-slashes-humanitarian-aid-by-51-despite-global-food-crisis
• https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/food-crisis-ukraine-war-1.6460194
• https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-61503049

Supply chain problems, war, inflation, fertilizers will set fire to the already high food prices.

What can the average middle-class person do to protect themselves from food problems?
Will buying more food and storing it solve the problem, or trying to start farming or investing and trying to increase his money to buy food at any price? Or what?

I live in a country where people still find it difficult to buy food, in addition to the ever-increasing price of food. The problem is finding a job
nowadays is getting more and more difficult, especially with the pandemic, many companies in my country are  reducing their employees.
This ultimately makes the crime rate increase, because many people are looking for ways to survive, even if the way is against the law.

Regarding your question for the average middle class person how do they fulfill their basic needs to buy food. Usually for people who have
a large enough land, of course they choose farming and gardening, in addition to being able to meet their daily food needs. If there is still
some left over from the harvest, we can usually sell it to the market to make money. But for me who lives in a big city, where land prices
are very expensive, so it is not possible to buy land for farming and gardening. Then hoarding food in large quantities is not a good solution,
because often hoarding too much food, will only make the quality of the food decrease. The most effective way is that we use technology to
make money, so we can buy food at any price.

If we are diligent in digging for information on the internet, there are lots of opportunities to be able to make money. So I think it's better to
work hard to earn money, so we can buy food, and I've also learned not to over-buy food. So that the money we make doesn't all go to food,
and we can still invest in crypto for our retirement plans.

Hoarding food will only be possible if you have a cold storage. But having dried goods will  be an option for everybody like dried fish, dried meat and there are even people storing dried fruits. I would probably do the same which I would keep a lot of peanut butter and dried products.

Its  easier to survive with food storage some will just cook very minimum like cooking porridge everyday from the sacks of uncooked rice you store. An average Joe I guess must learn to eat peasant's food as such.

[stompix]

It's not easy to run an animals or crops farm. It requires a lot of spare time, effort and care from the farmer. You need to work all day long to earn too little in return, because it's not only about planting the seeds, watering them or feeding the chickens once in a day. You need to check everyday (probably more than once) the crops to see if there are any diseases or parasites attacking it, you need to clean the chickens' spots, water and food trough, because it becomes dirty really fast, you need a very strict routine to not miss any daily task.

Some simply don't get it.
Let's take cows, for example, they don't care about anything, they don't care about summer or wintertime, they don't care about the rain outside, they won't give a damn yesterday was your birthday, they don't care it's Xmas, easter, your wedding, as soon as the sun starts to rise they will start a tantrum in the shed nobody will be able to sleep around. It's training, it's cold, you're sick, no, you have to go and bring them fresh water and straws, you can't imagine the noise if you ignore piglets or you're going to have the shock of your life seeing your chickens with half of their feathers left if you left them caged in.
I wouldn't want to go back to living on a  farm even with the current technology, we have automated gates and feeders I can control from the house, but those mean money, a ton of money.

It looks romanticized, but in fact it's a harsh life or better saying, a survival experiment.

And, the shit! The tons of tons of animal shit you have to clean, every day from the floor, from the alls, even from their feeding through, tons of it in all color and density. How would this look in real life, famine, famine after famine as we go back closer to a hunter-gather civilization!
If this shit would have worked we wouldn't have famine in the poorest countries of the world where everyone lives on agriculture, but surprise, it doesn't work like that.

People may have to abandon cities to migrate to more rural areas where self sufficiency is a more achievable goal.
 

Then why in every famine known to men people are fleeing to the cities and not the other way around? It's still the same even now
https://www.globalhungerindex.org/issues-in-focus/2018.html
As I said, there is fantasy and there is reality!

[dezoel]

The idea of buying and storing food is not bad, but it’s not like it would never finish, so what happens after the food finishes? It’s not like if you buy and store food it’s going to last forever, so when the food finishes, you are still going to buy at the current rate that those food stuffs are being sold.

So that really doesn’t change much, but I would say that the good thing about buying food to store is that you would buy them in buck, and that would possibly reduce the price a bit, because when you buy in large quantities, sellers would give you some kind of discounts. So, the best thing here would be on working on your means of income and also investing, so that he would be able to buy at any rate.

[Alisha-k]

The negligence on agriculture is what could result to this global food crisis. So far agriculture has been replaced with oil & gas alongside metal investment. It's of recent crypto came into the picture. Encouraging agriculture on a commercial base is the only way to curb the food crisis or make some sort of compulsory memorandum that will ensure every plants something no matter their profession

[LogitechMouse]

I don't know if these will work, but I think this might help to average JOE's there like me.

Never mind the wants and focus more on needs. Let's focus more on the things that we need like food and not buy the things that we want. Buying foods that will take a long time to expire might help as well. Being practical will help too since we need to budget our money especially us average and poor people, in order to have some money to be used on buying food. Having a different mindset of focusing more on needs rather than the wants. Planting some vegetables in our backyard will help.

[Sebas.tian]

Go grow your own food little joe. grow mushroom in your store room and grow vegies in your balcony. Use lesser water and do rainwater harvesting in your home. what else you can do. Don't waste food. It will be helpful for others

Exactly, it will really help people to overcome food crisis in their environment, if they will be able to follow the procedure farmers used to preserved their crops for long period of time. Am into peasant farming with the little money I made from crypto investment few months ago which will really help me to make more food available for my family to enjoy. I think many people will like to embrace this advise to avoid food crisis in their country by going into peasant farming to make food stuffs available for their family consumption. 

[mm2543363580]

Go grow your own food little joe. grow mushroom in your store room and grow vegies in your balcony. Use lesser water and do rainwater harvesting in your home. what else you can do. Don't waste food. It will be helpful for others

Exactly, it will really help people to overcome food crisis in their environment, if they will be able to follow the procedure farmers used to preserved their crops for long period of time. Am into peasant farming with the little money I made from crypto investment few months ago which will really help me to make more food available for my family to enjoy. I think many people will like to embrace this advise to avoid food crisis in their country by going into peasant farming to make food stuffs available for their family consumption. 

Joe can help in his little space - he can grow his food. Share food with the other.
promote organic and natural stuff. Also - as mentioned above by saving water and doing a little waste can be very helpful to the joe as well as for the planet.

[romero121]

I don't know if these will work, but I think this might help to average JOE's there like me.

Never mind the wants and focus more on needs. Let's focus more on the things that we need like food and not buy the things that we want. Buying foods that will take a long time to expire might help as well. Being practical will help too since we need to budget our money especially us average and poor people, in order to have some money to be used on buying food. Having a different mindset of focusing more on needs rather than the wants. Planting some vegetables in our backyard will help.

Limiting the unwanted expenses and buying foods that will last for longer time period is the good solution. Many people are used to specific food habit, and they should look for the alternate. Right now the main focus should be on food to survive and not on costly and tasty ones. In the short term it is impossible to grow crops. Understanding the time it is good to sow some seeds of different vegetables like spinach.

[Theones]

I don't know if these will work, but I think this might help to average JOE's there like me.

Never mind the wants and focus more on needs. Let's focus more on the things that we need like food and not buy the things that we want. Buying foods that will take a long time to expire might help as well. Being practical will help too since we need to budget our money especially us average and poor people, in order to have some money to be used on buying food. Having a different mindset of focusing more on needs rather than the wants. Planting some vegetables in our backyard will help.

Limiting the unwanted expenses and buying foods that will last for longer time period is the good solution. Many people are used to specific food habit, and they should look for the alternate. Right now the main focus should be on food to survive and not on costly and tasty ones. In the short term it is impossible to grow crops. Understanding the time it is good to sow some seeds of different vegetables like spinach.

Yes. that is so true - we have increased our resources so much that we face unnecessary trouble.
Good food, limited stuff, limited gossips, cutting off with toxic people are a few things an averge Joe can do to save himself and the other.

[istiak2277]

The best you can do is farm if you have enough land to do that. But if you are living in a city, then the best you can do is store dry food for the long term. However, there are foods that can be grown inside your apartment or on the rooftop. Extra food should be stored with the right procedure so that it can be eatable after a long time. Using ancient methods to store food would be good then.

[KingsDen]

What can the average middle-class person do to protect themselves from food problems?
Will buying more food and storing it solve the problem, or trying to start farming or investing and trying to increase his money to buy food at any price? Or what?

An average middle-class person who leaves in average environment(not urban main town  but area with availability of land with less expensive price) can survive by producing 80% of what he uses as food. It is very possible.

I vividly remember my childhood experience when my family will travel to the village to spend the Christmas period. I discovered that the villagers enjoy everything for free, I mean for free.
1. My grandfather will also go fishing and hunting. If he doesn't capture an animal, fish is compulsory, will get it. So the fish and meats my grandma uses for food are never bought.
2. Grandma plants all kinds of vegetables at her backyard. So she only buys salt for food as all other ingredients for food is produced by her.
3. There are fruit trees of different type in the compound.
I meant everything was free and I wished never to return to the city. But every January I would be forcefully taken back to the city against my wish.

When covid-19 started, I was first to rush back to a free home and behold there was no effect of covid-19 in that beautiful city. So, a low class citizen living in a freedom home is already protected against food scarcity.

[justdimin]

I don't know if these will work, but I think this might help to average JOE's there like me.

Never mind the wants and focus more on needs. Let's focus more on the things that we need like food and not buy the things that we want. Buying foods that will take a long time to expire might help as well. Being practical will help too since we need to budget our money especially us average and poor people, in order to have some money to be used on buying food. Having a different mindset of focusing more on needs rather than the wants. Planting some vegetables in our backyard will help.

More than just "will they work" but it's more like billions won't do anything about it. We are going to go straight into a food crisis, it's going to be a terrible thing in the near future and nobody will do anything to neither prevent it nor be ready for it. Sure there will be "some" people who will get these type of preventions but at the same time we are talking about something that will be rarely done hence why it will not be a big number.

So, the best thing you could do would be to make sure you are doing much better in financial sense, hence when the prices of food increases, we could afford it, even if they are very expensive.

[wiss19]

This is bad but thanks for the early warning. Poor people should act now and do what they can possibly do in order for them to survive the upcoming food crisis. Yes it's fine to buy food supplies now because they are still cheap but I think this will only apply to the supplies that doesn't expire easily because we don't know if how long the crisis will last or when it will start.

For the vegetables, we cant buy them in advance and stock them in the shelves for a long time because they can go bad easily so yes the only way is to plant them yourself in your own backyard. We can also sell them apart from using it on our own. That should give us some extra money.

[Fortify]

We started reading more reports that talk about the possibility of a global food crisis, especially in poor countries.

Supply chain problems, war, inflation, fertilizers will set fire to the already high food prices.

What can the average middle-class person do to protect themselves from food problems?
Will buying more food and storing it solve the problem, or trying to start farming or investing and trying to increase his money to buy food at any price? Or what?

It's worth considering the audience or who is actually writing the response for it to be relevant. I have seen numerous studies in the past that show that many countries in places like Europe and North America can have an extremely wasteful attitude when it comes to food. Over production is a huge thing and the amount of food that is thrown out every day by places like supermarkets is huge. A small factor in that is also the idea of an expiry date, which is generally a good idea for keeping food in a safe condition, but it definitely takes the most cautious view and consumers can be induced to throw out good food. Consumers should make a rational decision e.g. a block of cheese, which is essentially mould, that looks fine will most likely be safe for one or two extra days past expiry. Expiry dates are a great thing for manufacturing companies as it induces constant buying.

[palle11]

I think what the average person can do in this time of food crisis is to run into agriculture. Planting is a source of taking care of what would have been bought with money. A farmer always have variety of food to choose and eat from. The families of farmers always grow fat which is the evidence of good living. At least most farmers apart from taking their food from the farm, they also sell left overs to generate money for other things needed. This is a second option to what a farmer can do, to save and reinvest money in farming.

[Hydrogen]

I think chickens might be a good option. They can feed on termites, insects and other random things found in the environment. And produce a decent number of eggs every week.

You need space to keep chickens, this is by no means something you can do in cities, and in my specific case keeping anything other than pets is prohibited by law. Furthermore, chickens will certainly not be very productive in laying eggs if they are not provided with additional nutrition, which means that you need at least corn and grain as additional nutrition.

What may still be a problem are the diseases that prevail among birds, and if you keep chickens outdoors they are exposed to bird flu. So while it may seem easy, from the experience of some people I know personally, not everything is as simple as it seems.

Cats, dogs, rodents and pigeons can all be carriers of COVID afaik.

There isn't an elevated risk of contracting COVID or other illness from chickens, in contrast to other domesticated mammals.

Have you ever heard of creative financing?  I'll make up a new thing right here called creative chicken keeping. It involves city dwellers forming creative relationships with those who live in rural areas in city outskirts nearby to keep, feed and house their chickens at affordable prices!

I'll say this. I always thought farming was difficult and back breaking work where specialized knowledge was necessary. But as I learn more, I'm beginning to realize its not as hard as I thought it was. I think others could have a similar experience if they tried.

People may have to abandon cities to migrate to more rural areas where self sufficiency is a more achievable goal.
 

Then why in every famine known to men people are fleeing to the cities and not the other way around? It's still the same even now
https://www.globalhungerindex.org/issues-in-focus/2018.html
As I said, there is fantasy and there is reality!

Begging in the streets is the advantage of cities.

In traditional terms, cities also had better job options for entry level personnel. Easier access to surplus food. And easier access to assets for potential theft.

But things have changed a little. The permaculture off grid movement is gaining traction.

Cities no longer cater to the poor the way they did in past eras. In many cities its illegal to feed the homeless. Park benches have anti homeless deterrents built into them.

The homeless can no longer expect cities to feed and cloth them as generously as they did in past eras of history.

[Crypt0S0ul]

I want to say to those who suggest not to expense your money on less important things and offer storing foods. I don't think it can be the solution.

Everyone cannot contribute in this matter at this moment. Since it comes to the global food crisis, Even with the high price, You will be unable to buy food because if there is no food, How you will buy them? It's as if there is no food at all. But, If there is less food but expensive, In this case, Poor people will suffer from this.

If everyone steps up, It's possible to defend against the food crisis.

If you live in a village side, Start farming whatever you can. If you can farm rice, Do it. If you can vegetables, Do it. Start Saving Money.

[philipma1957]

canning with mason jars is pretty easy.

I do a few bushels of tomatoes for sauce.

Learn to dry meat into beef jerky. both beef jerky and mason jarred tomato will last a long time.

get a quality water filter and filter the water boil it and can it in mason jars.

Get dry beans. store in metal bento boxes.

get rice. store in metal bento boxes.

I can do all of the above for under $500 usd. I would have supplies for a few months  if I did it.

learn to make varied meals from above. you will need some basic spices.

Make sure you have at least 2 guns or shotguns with ammo for self defense or suicide if things get truly stupid.