We do have HUGE stockpiles of food. It's just not at grocery stores anymore, which can be a bit of a problem in times of crisis, for sure. Stockpiles of other shit: not so much. The reason we have huge stockpiles of food is because food is produced in seasonal patterns but consumed year-round. If you harvest apples twice per year, once in the southern hemisphere and once in the northern hemisphere, but you want to have apples available year-round, you'll need to stockpile them. And, with apples, they aren't grown much in the southern hemisphere, so we stockpile like a year's worth at basically all times. This is true of many crops, like potatoes, grains, corn, nuts, basically anything that can be dried out or chilled and stored gets stored. We COULD grow that stuff like we do for vegetables, which is in greenhouses on a constant cycle to always have fresh available, but it's pretty difficult to do that for plants like apple trees, and high-bulk crops like grains, onions, and potatoes, so we don't.
Speaking of potatoes, as a chef, I can tell you that I know when the first crop of the year comes out. The variety and quality of the potatoes will suddenly change when the first harvest of potatoes of the year comes out. The prior year potatoes become very cheap and generally get turned into fries and dried and frozen potato products (like mashed potato mix, shredded hashbrowns, that kind of thing), and the new, locally produced potatoes become available at lower prices. This, oddly enough, kind of sucks, at least in Michigan. The variety of large sized potatoes grown in Michigan, where I'm from, kind of suck. They tend to explode when boiled. The potatoes available in the winter are usually from Idaho and Eastern Oregon and are of a variety that doesn't fall explode so bad, but they do tend to have hollow-core*, a defect that requires an extra step to remove the nastiness at the very center of the potato. The variety grown in Michigan isn't prone to hollow-core, so that's nice, but is prone to explosions, which sucks. Trade-offs, I guess.
* What is hollow-core? you ask. Hollow-core is a defect that happens when potatoes grow really, really fast. The center of the potato forms a hollow cavity lined with potato skin and filled with grossness. This is easily removed if you cut the potato in half while peeling. An extremely similar (the same?) condition can also be caused by some kind of plant disease, in which case the cavity will be filled with rottenness and evil and often makes the whole potato useless. (Keep in mind that restaurants often peel potatoes after boiling, rather than before boiling. It's much, much faster that way. I highly recommend that you do that when making American Fries (aka Home Fries) at home.)
