The new bird flu story is going to have multiple impacts.
First off, making meat more expensive and bringing up "eat the bugs" pressure. No one's been able to figure out how to get fake meat down below $5/lb or so, which is more expensive than chicken or pork, so the only way to get people to eat it is to raise the price of cheap meat.
Also, current year leaders will not be able to resist a massive cull of backyard poultry. People can use it to become way too self-sufficient. We can't let regular people just raise their own eggs and meat. That stuff needs to come from a store where they can stop you from coming in if you didn't get the right shots, and a point of sale system that can lock you out if you've been at the wrong kind of protest.
Right on the money.
I reside in a large, liberal run city extolled for progressiveness. We have never signifigantly SEEN (food/regular goods) shortages except at for the very first Covid buy rush, and I notice it most in holiday merchandise. For large shortages like the Cream Cheese Incident, mostly at poor neighborhood or mom and pop locations. Otherwise, they have kept the middle class population well fed and shielded from the supply chain breakdown in stores.
When I go looking (comparing patterns of items out to previous years, cost comparison, etc) it becomes crystal clear everything that others see is happening all at once everywhere. Large cities just hide it better-but the dreaded shortage signs have started to appear in the last 2 weeks. Eggs and processed/man-made goods (think cereals, energy drinks, sugary crap, toys, anything from China or Big Names like Nestle)
And this whole meatless, anti-self dependance thing?
It's very, very visible at the corporate Firsts. The AMC theater this past evening, in a VERY upper middle class neighborhood was only offering impossible meat nuggets. All other meat options were crossed out entirely. Burger King is cranking out Impossible Whoppers, and Starbucks is shilling their impossible foods while continually not having regular meat.
Cities near us that used to allow chickens and other fowl have as early as 2013 banned ownership of them and declared it to be a threat to the "corpratism" of the town.
Clown world, and they've been emptying the cars for longer than we realize while the lion taming show distracted us.