In 1973 in the U.S., there was (everwhere but the discos) a shortage of meat, leading to boycotts over alleged price-gouging and the Nixon Admin trying to control prices and creating a black meat market. I remember reading some Doonesbury strips about it but I’ve never been clear on what caused it.
In the early 1970s, an outbreak of Southern corn leaf blight hit the U.S., starting in Florida and spreading north and west. In one year production dropped from a national average of 91 bushels per acre to 77.
As corn yields fell, prices rose. To compensate, livestock producers started cutting back on their herds. Beef production fell and the price skyrocketed. Nixon’s policies weren’t directly responsible (the last of his wage-price controls expired in April 1974) but the U.S. was already in an inflationary spiral (the first Arab oil embargo and resultant spike in fuel prices was in 1973) and a poor crop didn’t help things.
Strictly speaking there wasn’t a “shortage” – you could always find beef, pork and chicken. But, especially with beef, it was really expensive.
Yes, there were claims of price gouging, boycotts and everything else. But after a few years the blight faded away, corn prices fell, livestock producers rebuilt their herds and meat got relatively cheap again.
Hmmm . . . Maybe we should rethink getting too dependent on ethanol for fuel.
There was no shortage of meat in 73. The price rose due to supply but there was always meet on the shelves. I remember gas shortages though. Stations shut down because production went below minimum transportation requirements.
Just as an interesting aside:
A U.N. expert on Friday called the growing practice of converting food crops into biofuel "a crime against humanity,‘’ saying it is creating food shortages and price jumps that cause millions of poor people to go hungry.
That article is from October 2007 but I’ve heard it repeated many times. Changes in the availability of basic foodstuffs have long reaching consequences.
We can convert algae to diesel without affecting crop land so I don’t see it as a huge problem.
It’s a funny thing about agricultural trends. When a commodity early in the process becomes scarce or expensive, the ripples sometimes move in unexpected ways.
For example, a couple of months ago, the price of milk went down to the point where dairy farmers found no profit in feeding their cows. They thinned their herds. Dairy cattle are older, so their meat becomes hamburger and stew, but the effect was a temporary glut of beef. Even the better cuts were cheaper. It was a good time to stock my freezer with steaks. 
The hiccup in beef supply and prices rippled through feed, milk, pork, and, yes, ethanol.
Back to my point (you might have thought I was never coming back,) the smaller herds make less milk, which brings milk prices back up a bit. Once the beef glut is over, the price of beef rises again. With fewer cows eating hay and grain, the cost of making ethanol and piggy-meat gets lower.
Whatever makes meat more expensive first makes it briefly cheaper.
I don’t remember a shortage of meat, I do recall it becoming rather expensive. They even did an episode on All In The Family, where due to the cost of meat, Gloria went to New Jersey and bought steaks made of horsemeat and served it for dinner.
Edith Bunker:
Why does the ability to convert algae to diesel fuel mean that converting land growing human food to growing stock for ethanol is not a “huge problem”?
Presumably because ethanol is a rubbish fuel compared to diesel. All other things being equal[li], food-origin ethanol would take a small slice of a market dominated by algae-origin diesel. Even more so if the ethanol is expensive because humans are willing to pay good money to eat the feedstock. Conceptually, if you can make algae diesel cheaply you could then run it through a refinery and reform it into gasoline, thereby wiping ethanol out of the market completely.[/li]
That’s obviously making some rather humungously wild-assed assumptions about the availability of algae-diesel and it being produced only from non-arable land.
[*] Another giant sweeping assumption which is likely to be false