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If all food trade ended, only Guyana would be able to fully sustain its population's nutritional needs
(farmingdale-observer.com)
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this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2025
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This is a false premise from the get go, and it comes from an uninformed perspective on Food History. Food trade and mobility have been a part of nutrition and food systems throughout recorded history. Gastronomic autarchy stems from a fascist misunderstanding of the way food systems work, it's a fiction that only serves chauvinistic, parochial, short sighted aims.
The problem with food trade isn't the fact that it exists. The problem is that the global food system is geared toward profit and extraction rather than feeding people healthy, nutritious, culturally-relevant food, grown and/or produced without exploiting people, poisoning the soil, and decimating biodiversity.
The solution isn't shutting down trade, the solution is food sovereignty and justice, and just trade between equals, aware of the mechanisms and lies of neocolonialism and imperialism.
Even during the stone age there was trading. Several species now considered essentially central/northern european are indigenous to the Mediterranean region.
Yeah, I wanted to include prehistory, too, but as we don't have definite certainty on food trade before writing was invented, I chose to leave it out. Ethnobotany does point to active migration and mobility of animal and plant species following human flows for as long as there have been humans around. .
What happens to the global food exchange when the price of fossil fuels corrects to what it should be? Food items either have a high weight-to-price ratio, or are perishable, or both. Most of the "food mobility throughout history" that you're talking about is luxury foods, with some lighter non-perishables like nuts and oils and dried herbs and dried fruits.
For the average person eating 2400 calories a day prior to coal-powered shipping, less than 300 of those would come from trans-regional exchange. It's just not reasonable to suggest that any large fraction would be like that. You can reason for local greenhouses producing things, but ultimately the world is going to have to simplify back to a radius of less than 300 miles for sourcing food; 3000+ mile shipping is not compatible with food sovereignty, food justice, or climate justice.
You can't just "do the same thing but take capitalism out of the equation". If you grow fresh vegetables for consumption more than 1000 miles away, it's going to be prohibitively expensive. If it's affordable, this comes at a cost either to the workers, or to the environment, or both.
There's a reason why Cuba, North Korea, and Vietnam practice gastronomic autarchy, and it's not because of a "fascist misunderstanding of how the way food systems work". They understand food systems better than treat junkies in the West.