> To reassign crops for feedstock to human consumption is not as easy as it sounds.

It is done all the time. On dry years, when grain prices increase, meat producers hush to sell their cattle and the extra grain does get into the people's diet. The reverse happens all the time too.

On the customer side, a change on food price leads first to a change on meat consumption, what couples nicely with the production side. Of course, any price change pushes some people over the starvation line (on whatever direction), but this is something societies can fight.

It's just not done on the scale that a supervolcano would imply.

> To reassign crops for feedstock to human consumption is not as easy as it sounds.

This is correct, but feedstock type foods are easier to store and re-route than other food with a shorter shelf life. Over the pandemic I never had an issue finding basics like flour or potatoes. Foods that became scarce were meat, dairy and highly-processed foods.

> Over the pandemic I never had an issue finding basics like flour

flour was almost impossible to buy early in the pandemic in the US at least. Seemed like more of a demand side issue as everyone (including me) started baking bread at home. It took months for them to start having full stocks of flour again.

One pound bags of flour coming to grocery stores through the grocery supply chains were in high demand, because previously almost no one bought flour on that channel. Meanwhile, bakeries kept on trucking along, AFAICT, with an uninterrupted supply of 50lb bags from the non-retail supply chain.

Yup, in the UK the local butcher started selling flour in clear plastic bags with a hand written sticker on it.

I guess they had an existing relationship with flour wholesale to make their pie pastry and just re-bagged it in house.

At least in the midwest that was just the retail small bags of flour. I noticed the same as other comments - none of the restaurant supply stores around me were ever out of 50lb bags of flour, which is what I ended up buying. Yeast was a little more scarce however, even the bulk bags.

Of course it's hard, but note that the volcano eruptions happened one year before the, so there's a year to prepare. Ideally you plant human edible food in the first place. As for "those lucky enough to survive this pandemic"... most people didn't die. It's only a small minority that actually died from covid. It's been significantly more than would die usually, so this was extremely annoying for the healthcare system, but it's not been sth. like the plague or so.