It isn't a miracle food if you can't make more

    I saw a news article indicating that the South American peasants who used to live on quinoa (pronounced like keen-wah, in case you hadn't heard) can no longer afford it because we health conscious Americans are driving up the price. Now. I'm as prone to white liberal guilt as anyone on Earth could possibly be, but I can't help but notice that there's a whole lot of acreage under tillage in a crop that most governments claim that they don't want their people using. (I speak of course of roses. OK, coca.) So maybe some expansion of quinoa acreage would be possible to help bring the price back down.
    However, it strikes me, as it has often before (ouch!) that our food distribution system is insane. Supermarket after supermarket filled with shelf after shelf full to the brim of stuff that most people may or may not buy. Apparently, it's very important psychologically for those shelves to be filled at all times. (Maybe it is. The one time I was in a store where the shelves were not filled, I was damned sure that it was going out of business shortly-- and I was right.)
    As it applies to this case, our food production and distributions companies have decided that Americans want quinoa. So there's a glut of quinoa related products out there that people don't necessarily want or even know if they want.
    Now I don't know if the news story I saw was accurate. I don't know if there are Bolivian peasants forced to eat Big Macs because they can't get their quinoa on. And I don't know how workable amping up quinoa production would be either. But it seems crazy to take a chance on creating a shortage in places where something is a staple commodity when you don't know if Americans even want it.
    I wrote a Masters thesis on Japanese carmaking, and it occurs to me that it would be really great if we could reduce inventories massively in our food distribution system and thus reduce duplication and waste. Amazon may eventually bring back a speedier version of the Sears catalog version of the earlier 20th century. I'm not sure that that would be a bad thing.