what do you think is the probability that rule of law remains strong, conditional on there being severe food shortages for a few weeks? this is relevant in two ways: first, you may also need to stock items for personal defense; second, it may be important to store things in your residence specifically, as opposed to a storage container, which would be more convenient for apartment dwellers.
Ostensibly, if only the police are well fed then they'll go to work and enforce the rules. But I worry that a critical mass of people will get hungry and angry. My worry is that when the brain gets too hungry it turns off the smart parts and reverts to its insincts. The cortex take a lot of energy to run at full speed. The brain is setup so that if the cortext fails -for whatever reason- then the insincts keep working on their own. Even if hangry ppl dont burn it all down in the first two weeks, I think hangry ppl suck to be around in ways we are not accustomed to?
This is a place where we can look at how things have gone in real situations, and not try reasoning through from first principles:
It looks like anger and force are generally targeted at governments and stores, not individuals. Violence was typically around stores and in the streets; staying home and out of the way was often much safer. I do think keeping food in your house instead of an easily-robbed shed is good, though.
presumably people would not think to attack the random storage unit place though? like usually those are filled with random shit like furniture that's useless in a famine. presumably very few people are putting food in their storage units. and the units are usually individually locked with pretty strong padlocks and made of pretty solid steel sheets, so a prospective robber would have to bring an angle grinder in and spend days slowly working their way through all of the units.
I guess the bigger concern is it might be hard to get safely from your apartment to the storage unit and back, if there's violence in the streets?
I think more people should be storing a substantial amount of food. It's not likely you'll need it, but as with reusable masks the cost is low enough I think it's usually worth it.
It's hard for me to really imagine living through a famine. The world as I have experienced it has been one of abundant calories, where people are generally more worried about getting too many than too few. Essentially no one dies in the US from food unavailability. Globally, however, it's different: each year millions die from hunger.
If you look at the circumstances of modern famines, they're downstream from systems failing. Society was functioning well enough that most people got enough calories, then something went seriously wrong, most likely war. This is one of the reasons that it's hard to use donations to reduce hunger deaths: getting food to people stuck in war zones is very hard.
This means from an altruistic perspective I feel torn: the current situation is horrible, but it's also not where I think my donations would go farthest and so it's not where I donate. This is the painful reality of living in a world that is far worse than it could be, doing what we can and knowing it's not enough.
I also look at famine from a selfish perspective, however, thinking about how this risk might impact me and the people I most love. [1] As someone whose day job involves trying to reduce rare-but-catastrophic risks, I do think global famine is plausible. Our systems are robust to localized problems, but much less so to widespread disasters. Storing food to reduce the worst outcomes seems worth doing. [2]
The approach we take is buying extra of the non-perishables we usually eat, and rotating through them. Our main cost is in buying some food earlier than we normally would. We eat a lot of pasta and beans, and a pound of pasta and can of beans give about a person-day of calories and protein for $2, or $60 for a month's worth.
The $60 cost isn't the real number, though, because you're investing: you can always eat this food later if you need the money. If the market would give you a 5% real return and the value of food roughly tracks inflation, the annual cost of keeping $60 as food is $3 ($60 * 5%). I think this is worth doing for most people until you bump into the limit of what you have space to store or what you'll rotate through before it spoils, and may be worth it beyond that depending on how likely you think the risks are.
Aside from the tail-risk reduction, there are also day-to-day benefits of having more food on hand. We can go to the grocery store less often, buy a larger proportion of our food when it's on sale, go to the farther store that charges less, and cook more things without going to the store. [3]
Like many preparedness questions, a lot of this comes down to how much space you have. When we were living in apartments, moving ~yearly and where each sqft counted, we only did a little of this (buying extra pasta). But now that we're in a house (where I strongly hope to never move again) and generally have more space it's worth it for us to do a bunch more. Something to consider next time you're at the store?
[1] Having kids made me feel much more strongly here. I already did this some before having kids because it seemed reasonable, but the idea of them not having enough to eat is viscerally horrifying in a way that's hard to think or write about.
[2] A rough EV estimate: storing three months of food costs $180 up front and so $9 in lost returns annually, not having enough food in a 3-month famine might give a 5% chance of death, and perhaps you value your life at $10M. This gives a conditional benefit of $500,000, and means it's worth it as long as you think your annual odds of experiencing a 3-month famine are at least 0.002%.
[3] For example, this evening Lily decided she wanted to cook dinner, making a vegetarian curry she'd learned from a friend. It turned out we already had everything in her recipe on hand, with a few substitutions (ex: canned tomatoes instead of fresh).