When trust in systems wanes

I’ve said it before: there is a simple trio of things that make me feel particularly, foolishly secure.

A basement cold room with a full batch of homemade beer and this year’s potatoes, garlic and onions, a woodpile with enough seasoned wood for the winter, and the small chest freezer carefully stocked and layered with well-packed meat, blueberries, partridgeberries and homemade applesauce.

But last year’s city-shutting snowfall in St. John’s — and this year’s never-ending pandemic — have added another level to that trifecta.

Dry goods — from pasta to beans to canned tomatoes and soup stocks — now occupy a wire shelf in the basement, a kind of look-ahead pantry that reminds me of my mother’s basement food corner. (Except she would have added home dried wild mushrooms, dried apples and a roomful of homemade wines, distinguished by the batch number written in Magic Marker on the corks. Oh, and once, epically, a whole Italian ham of mysterious origin that hung from the rafters in Dad’s darkroom for months. I watched it change through a variety of colours and grow a minor but still obvious fur sleeve with a mixture of horror and curiosity.)

Her freezer was not a small one like mine: hers was fullsized, and handled purchases like a half a pig from a local farmer, or a quarter of a steer. I remember butchering day all too well.

I also remember that I didn’t like Mom’s home-grown, home-stored and homemade solutions. I wanted grilled cheese sandwiches, Velveeta cheese on factory-made sliced white bread, not homemade lumpy bread made from the whole wheat flour that lived in a 50pound sack in the basement. I preferred store-bought button mushrooms to the wild and funky fungi Mom would harvest by hand. (And I’m sure I told her that regularly as a child. Kids are rotten.)

But pragmatism is a careful teacher, so the pantry grows and so does a bunch of other forward-planning. I’m not a doomsday prepper by any means, but planning for the unusual is a new and significant effort.

Rotating through your canned stocks and dry goods is new to me — used to “just-in-time” grocery goods — and is essential to keep from throwing dated things out.

I recognize that not everyone can afford to do it; living paycheque to paycheque means you don’t have deep enough pockets to “bank” extra food. For many, food security is also limited by the tiny amount of space in their refrigerator’s freezer. (It’s even more limiting if it’s a frost-free freezer, because those do a great job of degrading whatever’s in there for any long-term period.)

Apartment-dwellers can’t take advantage of sales, because they don’t have a place to store windfall purchases of discounted stocks of canned goods.

But I remember when the pandemic was at its early stages in this country, and the sudden rush for flour and yeast, and the home baking resurgence, and I realize that I’m likely far from alone.

Chances are, many of you have the same basement surplus that I now do. Some of you have always had it — and congratulations on that. Emergency organizations like the Red Cross stress the need to be prepared for at least 72 hours on your own. And there are significant savings to be had if you have the space to strike when the sales iron is hot on a particular product you use.

For me, it’s the end of what had been an age of innocence, a small but significant erosion in the systems we’ve spent a generation getting used to.

Maybe, one day, it will wear off. Truth is, though, I remember my parents and grandparents, and for them, it didn’t. Russell Wangersky’s column appears in SaltWire newspapers and websites across Atlantic Canada.