If one staple food disappears, the country won't just starve; that would be stupid. It will start eating something else. If Norway entirely stopped producing food, it would still eat just fine, and if it entirely stopped eating dairy, it would still have plenty of food.
As long as Norway can import food, there is no problem. That is not what food security is about in the case of Norway - we're wealthy, we can outbid "anyone" for food if need be.
The issue is what if we can't. As I've pointed out elsewhere in this thread, this has happened - the most well known instance being the British 5 year naval blockade during the Napoleonic wars, which caused years of famine, and death.
And because of Norway's extremely strategic position, with a long coast line and many defensible ports if you have naval superiority, coupled with huge oil industry, and a position to lock the Russian Northern fleet out of the Atlantic, any defence planning for Norway is going to assume that in the case of another war, Norway will either be occupied or attempted blockaded or both.
Then the situation changes. Norway has very little arable land due to the mountains, so it is not a given that taking the dairy away would leave us with sufficient food in the case of a blockade. Certainly during the British blockade we did not have enough food to sustain a much smaller population.
How do the cows eat? I've always been under the impression that raising animals is vastly more resource intensive than just feeding yourself on plants. Raymond Crotty, I believe, documented that raising cows for dairy is something like ten times more efficient than raising them for meat, but I'd still expect grain to be even easier to get -- animals are something of a luxury item.
>How do the cows eat? I've always been under the impression that raising animals is vastly more resource intensive than just feeding yourself on plants.
the cows (and other grazing animals in their group) evolved very special stomach to consume the grass (parts of grasses) which aren't consumable by predators like humans.
The comparison of consuming human-edible plants (or their parts) directly vs. feeding it to cows is rooted in industrialized beef production where corn is fed to cows. Such wasteful conversion of human edible food into more tastier/pricier human edible food allows for higher revenue and larder total profits - people will eat the same calories, beef is just more expensive packaging of it and thus generates more total revenue and profit in the societies which can afford it and want it.
>I'd still expect grain to be even easier to get -- animals are something of a luxury item
In normal situation, cows milk is a source of calories _additional_ to the grain as cows are fed on grasses grown where grain cultivation doesn't make much sense - short summer, not plain land, etc... They also fed on [minimally processed - fermented in big piles] wheat stems after grain is extracted. The cows feed today also includes processed waste from other areas of food industry - the quality of this stuff varies greatly from country to country depending on regulations and industry and society mentality about it.
>If one staple food disappears, the country won't just starve; that would be stupid.
shortage of staple food will cause price spike with related economical/political/social effects. Staple food isn't just a whimsical choice of consumer. Beside some exceptions (where people moved and brought their tradition with them), a staple food is a result of hundreds or thousands of years of evolutionary optimization for that population in that region. Milk in Europe is exactly such a case, and is a very important one to the population there. (see my other post in this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7034795). Specifically, in case of milk in Norway any issues with its availability, in addition to short term price-spike related effects, would in long term affect negatively health and well being of children whose body/skeleton would be forming at the time.
I'm completely on board with the idea that eliminating milk from the northwest european diet would be hugely disruptive and have unknown knock-on nutritional effects due to long-term adaptation to milk consumption. My point in that area was limited to the idea that hunger wouldn't be an issue.
However, my other point, that Norway can easily import 100% of its food demand (see "if Norway entirely stopped producing food, it would still eat just fine"), stands.
