Has anyone heard anything about food rationing?   My mom said that on our local news channel today, they were talking about food rationing in our area.  I looked on line to see if I could find anything about it, and I saw an article in the New York Sun, and here is a part of the article:

Frugal2

 I haven't heard anything...but I find the idea frightening

Wow. I hadn't heard that. I have been following the news, especially the national evening news, pretty closely. Tonight on ABC News there was another story about food shortages around the world. One of the things they mentioned is countries stopping their exports of foods. For example, rice is up 141% a bushel, so India is no longer exporting rice, because they are worried about having enough to feed their people. Well, that further reduces the amount of rice in the global market, and that drives the cost up further. I wonder if this is a localized kind of that same phenomenon.

 If you can find a reference to the story, I'd like to see it...

 Michigander Fan

 Im in New England and havent heard anything about food shortage in stores with rationing. Babs

I just googled it, and the only story I found was the one exerpted from in the original post (the article from the NY Sun). While I'm not discounting the Sun (not being from New York, I have no idea how accurate their reporting tends to be), I would be more confident if I had been able to find another source of the story. Also, the author of the story seems a little uninformed - after all, rationing is not unthinkable in the USA - it happened during WW2, so within living memory (not mine, but some peoples')

After reading the article, it sounds more like something that happens a fair amount - a grocery store limiting the amount any one person can buy of an item, just so there's more to go around. Maybe that's unusual, but not in my experience. I wish I had a dollar for every time I heard a Kroger commercial that said "X on sale for Y, limit 5".

I'm not saying rationing won't happen.  (I heard just tonight that now in the Phillipines, hoarding is a crime punishable by life imprisonment, based on food shortages there. Wow.)   I would say that our first step would maybe be to limit the amount of food we export (which is scary, because millions of people rely on the food we provide) and only then would we seriously ration.

Just my 2 cents.

Michigander Fan 

I heard it on a couple of radio talk shows this morning, but only in passing. There was no mention of more than one source or that it was really happening, but only that it might happen.

Perhaps we should have begun growing our own foods long ago. I  don't mean rice paddies in our back yards of course but as a nation we should support crops here on American soil and producing more of our own items again.

I am not sure where Canadians stand with local growing so I won't comment for them.

In BC Canada,  Here there is a movement called the 100 mile diet http://100milediet.org/   A local couple gave themselves a challenge of eating locally wrote a book called the 100 mile diet:  A year of eating locally.  took them 7 mths to find a farmer that grew wheat.    The idea is to eat only foods that grow close to home.  They did a lot of preserving.  Lucky they lived here in the lower mainland not up north.  so veggies, fruit, meat, eggs, honey is not that hard to get.  They cooked from scratch, canned etc.

Brandy:

Perhaps we should have begun growing our own foods long ago. I  don't mean rice paddies in our back yards of course but as a nation we should support crops here on American soil and producing more of our own items again.

I agree with you Brandy. I think it's time this country looked closer at taking of it's own first.

I am planning a garden with my friend at her house, and then I am planning one or possibly two gardens here at mine. I am hoping to grow as much as I can this year to help keep costs down.

Brandy:

Perhaps we should have begun growing our own foods long ago

If this country had encouraged back yard gardens and local farming like was done during WWII instead of buying food from foreign countries out of season like now we would be used to that kind of lifestyle instead of fretting over having shortages.  In other words as a nation we would have been experienced at living on what was grown and available seasonally to us, possibly the canning habit wouldn't have almost disappeared, and managing our home food supply would be second nature to us. We would be experienced in stocking a pantry and looking to the future needs of our families. Farmland would have been more valuable for growing food instead of being sold to a developer to grow houses. I think we have reached our limits of progression in this country, to the point that we cannot support our huge population without making some serious lifestyle changes. Edey