No, we’re not running out of rice in the U.S. We are particularly not running out of rice in California, where we grow it. We’re also not running out of wheat. If the Costco isn’t selling you rice, they probably messed up their order and some junior manager is lying to you about rationing.

The price of food is indeed high and rising. People in less fortunate countries are rioting because they can’t afford to eat. Here in the U.S., poor people are being squeezed. People like me don’t even notice because we make good money.

This is a good time to think about what you eat. It’s an even better time to take a good look at where the food comes from, how it’s produced, and how it’s distributed. As usual, the root problems are about money: farm subsidies, water subsidies, tariffs, big agricultural companies who control all of those things, and bad government all over the world.

And in the U.S. particularly it’s about oil. Because you can’t grow food the way we do without artificial fertilizer, which is made of energy. And once we have all that bounty of soy and corn, we have to sell it somehow. And so we convert it into ethanol and celebrate our new energy, free from foreign oil! …that’s made from foreign oil. And up go the grain prices.

For me the threat is not rice rationing at the supermarket. The threat is endless war to keep our own food prices low with cheap oil.

Funny how it comes back there every time!