According to recent reports by multiple media outlets, humans have a new reason to throw ourselves at the totalitarian alter of the Religion of the Climate Panicker: we’re running out of Sriracha sauce. Now, coming from Arizona, I can fully agree that a sriracha shortage is a panic-worthy event. Despite what the LA Times, The Hill, Business Insider, USA Today and numerous others are reporting, the cause of the shortage is far more mundane: it’s the result of a dispute between Huy Fong Foods and their former supplier.
Thanks to CNBC for doing real journalism and getting this story right. The whole issue goes back to 2017, when Huy Fong foods entered into a legal dispute with Underwood Ranches, the grower who had been supplying their peppers for the previous 28 years. CNBC expanded their reporting with this piece which details the legal issue at stake – in short, a complicated one that appears to have been far from cut and dried. The upshot for consumers, though, is pretty simple. Huy Fong, upset at what they perceived as being overcharged, dumped their longtime supplier in favor of purchasing cheaper jalapenos from a variety of producers in California, New Mexico, and Mexico. In good years when the weather yields a bumper crop of peppers, this approach works, saving the company money. In other years, however, the result has been a failure, resulting in the kind of shortages we’re seeing now.
Did Huy Fong Foods make a bad decision? The answer is probably ‘yes’, though I haven’t bothered to try to quantify the impact of the change on their bottom line. Perhaps Huy Fong is saving enough money that even with a shortage the end result is positive profitability. I don’t know. What I do know is that the weather changes every single day, every single year. That results, both regionally and globally, in boom-and-bust agricultural cycles: something people understood intuitively when a majority of this country was employed in agriculture, and don’t seem to understand at all now that most folks just assume that everything they want is supposed to appear when they want it on their local store shelves.
To be fair, a lot of leftist policy makers actually do understand that natural cycles which have absolutely nothing to do with climate change are the real culprits in situations like this. They just can’t sell that reality for media hits, donor contributions, and corrupt insider trading the way they can climate change panic.
Lastly, we got you: if you can’t find a bottle of your favorite spicy treat on local store shelves, there’s no need to take the advice of Democrats and start riding the bus while noshing on fried locusts, here’s a handy Rumble video on how to make your own.
Note: the opinions expressed herein are those of Sam Stone only and not his co-host Chuck Warren or Breaking Battlegrounds’ staff.