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The US exports a lot of cheese. $2.2B/year or ~5% of global trade.



I'd imagine that the entire international trade of cheese carries just a tiny part of the cheese consumed over the world.


Sure, but a lifetime is also a long time.


A very small part of a tiny part tends to overwhelm that duration.

That is to say, most people probably never eat US-made cheese, and those that did mostly did so while physically on the US.

Also, most of that exported cheese tends to go to the same few places. That happens to every kind of product.


If noting unusual ever happened then I might agree with you but unusual events like significant US food aid after disasters are going to significantly affect these numbers even if it’s just for a few meals after an earthquake or political subsidy such as in 1965-1966 where US cheese flooded India. Several other countries had similar events during the early days of the green revolution.

Mad Cow disease is a more recent example where global supply chains shifted and suddenly people were eating a lot more imported products or products from different countries.

Further, from restaurants, ingredients in packaged food, vacations, baby food, pot luck’s, to one off sampling of a MRE many people have done something once which completely changed the supply chain for their normal diet.

PS: I’d agree it’s under 50% globally when including children, but for the HN audience specifically it’s probably over that.


Does this come from federal stockpiles? Earnest question; how logistics happen is intentionally obscured from the perspective of consumers.


I think there is both “government cheese” and various pizza products made with subsidized cheese and dairy.


Any idea where the history of some of this stuff might be?

I’m suddenly curious where the cheese air lifted into Berlin after WWII came from.


> $2.2B/year or ~5% of global trade.

You think global trade amounts to 44 billion dollars per year?

The United States alone has a GDP of 29,000 billion dollars. World GDP for 2023 seems to be estimated at 105,000 billion dollars.

By that estimate, $2.2B / year is 0.000021% of global trade.


They may be referring just to the global trade of cheese.


The claim would be just as stupid; US cheese exports are somewhere around 7% of US cheese production. The US is not 86% of world cheese production.


No you misunderstood again, US cheese exports make up ~5% of global cheese trade between countries.

Further, when you first read “global trade” and thought “all global trade” why would you suddenly from “global trade of cheese” to “global production of cheese”.


Production and trade are the same thing. That's what we mean when we say trade.

Why would you object to the idea that the amount of global trade in cheese is equal to the global production of cheese, but not to the idea that the amount of global trade is equal to the amount of global production?

You could argue that there's more trade than there is production, because of reselling, but that would once again dramatically shrink the share of cheese trade that you could attribute to US cheese exports, which don't take future reselling into account.




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