Means produce from Texas Rio Grande Valley and California. IH-40 is that route. Sorta parallels the Big Inch pipeline as the route shifts to IH-81 from Knoxville, TN to head north thru Virginia into Pennsylvania.
The beef haulers are primarily on IH-70 from Kansas. Chicken is mainly from the IH-10 & IH-20 parallel corridor out of the Deep South. Same for catfish & rice. Pork is mainly Midwestern.
Understand that there are no family farms and ranches. Not anymore. Those you believe exist are the first step of the food assembly line of the Prairies and Great Plains. Americas Factory Floor.
Dairy is not local. Tankers travel hundreds of miles to your “local” dairy. Up to 600 on an all-day run. Contributor Homer in western Arkansas drinks milk, for example, that originated from multi-hundred milking cow operations in New Mexico.
Which in their turn require truckloads of alfalfa and other inputs.
Each round-trip of that dairy tanker requires 250-gallons of diesel to have moved only a few thousand gallons of milk on a trip of that length.
“Food” equals concentrated energy inputs at every step of assembly. Of which there are 5-6 load points by every category.
Diesel matters. Not gasoline. The WWII ration was (1) gallon per family per week. Gasoline doesn’t produce meaningful economic activity. Nothing new is manufactured nor value added.
Food = Diesel. Farm tractors, railroad, and big trucks. Ergo, diesel is civilization.
This country and all others will never build the electrical capacity to sustain an electric-recharge fleet. Not cars nor trucks nor trains.
Had the threat of energy dependence been real (it wasn’t), you’d have seen new nuclear plants all over the USA to electrify the 50,000-miles of railway that the DOD classifies as critical. (Easing in dedicated electric fleets for short run would have then been easier).
A local shortage of diesel can be worked around via electrified rail (distribution). Pipelines aren’t simple, but they’re also not complicated. Same energy input would apply. Massive distribution + rationing.
The pipelines have manual controls. Computers are not required to run them. Big Inch was built in the opening days of WWII. The problem at the other end are the refineries which are complex.
Refineries take days, even weeks, to shut down and re-start. Meanwhile both crude and natural gas are backing up, Those fields can be shut off, but some will never re-start.
American cities were ethnically cleansed of the only group which produces an economic surplus lifelong. And they became faced with a far higher transportation cost versus urban-density (electric) mass transit. Societally stupid, but fits the plans of the Enemy just fine.
Kinda convenient that many will (have been) accumulating mental/spiritual/physical/economic insults lifelong. Gasoline became the lifeline ignored. The single thread by which they and their families dangle.
For want of a nail the shoe was lost . . . .
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