Giving Compass' Take:

· Americans already have millions of pounds of food stocked in their freezers, but The New Food Economy explains that the threat of higher tariffs from the trade war with Mexico and China may lead to more storage.

· What impact will trade agreements have on global food markets? 

· Although America seems to have enough frozen meals to feed everyone in the country, food instability is a real threat to our world.

Last month, America’s vast network of refrigerated warehouses held enough frozen whole turkeys to feed every single family in the country on Thanksgiving. At the same time, the country’s public and privately owned freezers had 27 million pounds of raspberries socked away for a rainy day. We also had more than a billion pounds of frozen juice concentrate in storage across the nation, and an additional billion pounds of frozen blueberries. That’s according to the United States Department of Agriculture’s cold storage report, released every month from the National Agricultural Statistics Service.

During a normal month, the cold storage report provides a fascinating snapshot into America’s pantry. In May, for instance, 60,215,000 pounds of shelled pecans languished in giant refrigerators across the nation. That’s the highest number for the month of May since record-keeping began in 1970. If those pecans were redistributed today, 120 million cooks could use them to make pecan pies—and if those pies were each cut into eight slices, everyone in the U.S. could have almost three.

Read the full article on America's cold storage problem by H. Claire Brown at The New Food Economy.