People are still eating every meal every day so all this excess food that's being destroyed must be food that people normally paid for then servers put onto a plate and then customers decided to not eat. Food that normally went into the dumpster behind the restaurant as they bussed the tables.
People don't buy their own food and kill it themselves. They rely on a middle man. Right now the middle man is struggling to stay open because 20-30% of their employees are getting sick. Consumer demand will drop if they think their food was made by sick people and the government may shut them down.
The middle man buys from the farmer. So when he stops buying it doesn't matter if the customers want to eat or not, because they can't buy from the middle man who no longer is selling to the grocery stores.
If end users are hungry they'll need to bypass the grocery stores, with packaged meat from the meat processing plants, find a farmer and learn to butcher and store their own. It will take a little while for the store supply disruptions to catch up given our freezer and refrigeration capacity.
Then all the sudden the news will claim it's hoarders buying up all the meat. Which we all know isn't true.
I guarantee every farmer culling his animals for nothing would take something for them if you offer them money. I'm going to talk to my parents about seeing if their neighbor has a few hogs he'd like to sell.
