Confessions of a ‘corona-prepper’
For weeks, Angela Buttolph has been quietly stocking up, but – oh, the relief ! – she’s not the only one playing it super-safe
Earlier this week, I came out on social media. My name’s Angela and I am a coronavirus food prepper. I’d been carefully keeping this a deep, dark, super-embarrassing secret. I thought I was the only one gripped by paranoia, surrounded as I was by people repeating the mantra: “Flu kills more people each year!” But then my friend Mel boldly admitted on Facebook: “I’ve given in to my primal urge to stock up in case of a coronavirus outbreak.” Oh, the relief! Finally, an ally!
And so I confessed all; I’d had 150 tins of food delivered a fortnight ago. Others piled on to the thread, sharing their own dirty secrets – about finding the best paper masks (apparently, FFP3 are
A part of me was excited to try that 70s’ lunch favourite – corned beef
the gold-standard), tracking down industrial-strength anti-bac hand gel (fast selling out). “I’ve bought a litre of hand sanitiser and stocked up on lentils,” another reported.
“Our food delivery driver this week had just delivered £900 worth of food to a neighbour, who said they were not going to leave the house for a few weeks,” posted another. Once I started asking around, it was everywhere – from husbands returning home with the car boot piled high with booze and frozen food to friends “getting a few extra bits, just in case”.
I can’t take credit for my foresight. Weeks ago, my father, a scientist, told me matter-of-factly: “It’s time to start putting away some supplies, in case you need to isolate yourself, and deliveries are stopped.” I laughed, but he pointed out that, as I have severe asthma,
I’m in an at-risk group – as are my parents, now in their late seventies.
Still, I shrugged it off. But the very next day, the “superspreader” was revealed to be a parent at a Brighton primary school and, as the mother of a primary school-aged child, my blood ran cold. If Brighton, why not here in leafy St Albans? Now my dad’s words seemed prescient, not paranoid: I had visions of empty supermarket shelves, looting of stores and fighting in the aisles.
Following a semi-hysterical call to my husband, I logged on to the Tesco website but, after some wild-eyed scrolling, I realised I didn’t really know what I was looking for. (Note to online supermarkets: launch those food-prepper packages now.) Our freezer is minuscule, just three drawers and, besides, I didn’t like the idea of relying on an appliance in an emergency. No, it would have to be tins, and if I was going down that route, I might as well follow this project to its ultimate conclusion: googling “apocalypse food prep UK”.
I arrived at ukpreppersguide.co.uk and found a post entitled “Basic Food Storage for Prepping for Disasters And SHTF”. SHTF being “s--- hits the fan”. I decided a coronavirus outbreak would definitely qualify.
The post told me how much to buy for a month for a family of four. OK, so coronavirus usually only requires a fortnight’s isolation, but once you start imagining the end of the world, you get reeeally cautious.
My brain was beginning to buzz with the imagined urgency of my task. Supposing other people were also doing this right now and the tins would be all sold out by the time I ordered? Supposing deliveries were suspended?
Focus, focus… I flicked back to my Tesco tab and perused the options. Ooh, sweet and sour chicken could certainly cheer things up during a month of dreary isolation. But when I reread the food preppers blog, I realised I was making a rookie error – its list of basic rations was just that: tins of plain meat which, for two parents and a child, could be one meal. A can of sweet and sour chicken, half sauce and vegetables, would only serve one. I got down to basics: tinned chicken (eww), ham, tuna. How did I get here? We pretty much just eat fresh fish and freshly made vegetarian food these days. However, a small part of me was quite excited to try that Seventies primary school lunch favourite, corned beef.
Let’s face it, this isolation malarkey, if it comes to that, is not going to be glamorous or fun. We might actually not want to survive by the end of it – quarantine with a bored six-year-old will be gruelling enough without grim food. The methane alone from all the cans of beans and pulses (essential protein) might finish us off.
In the end, it took three hours to order 150 cans. If you think a weekly shop is faffy, imagine you’re prepping for Armaggedon in unknown, tinned-food territory. The bright side is at least it’s cheap – a necessity, given that I ordered 45 cans of meat, 25 cans of fruit, 50 cans of vegetables, 17 tins and packets of beans and chickpeas, 15 bags of rice, eight bags of porridge, five jars of honey, five bottles of anti-bac liquid soap (hand gel was out of stock), a large table salt, giant box of laundry detergent, giant pack of loo roll. It came to £136.85 – 175 items for a next-day delivery (no time to waste).
I didn’t feel like I was overreacting. Until the Tesco delivery man rang the bell the next day, entirely concealed behind a sixfoot-high stack of crates. I had briefly thought about the fact that Tesco no longer offer bags with deliveries as I merrily racked up the items in my online shopping basket, but nothing prepared me for the vast volume of food that was about to invade my tiny home. Each crate I emptied into the hallway was an avalanche.
The delivery man, ungallantly standing watching me scrabbling around, asked: “You stocking up a bit?” Red-faced, I mumbled: “Yes, that kind of thing.”
He wasn’t convinced. “Are you having a party? Going on holiday? Is it for Brexit?” which felt somehow in the right ballpark, but that fear obsession is so last year. I was far too mortified to admit what I was doing. I realised I looked completely mad. I might as well have told him I was stocking up for a zombie apocalypse.
My husband arrived home during the can tsunami, gawped in alarm, but wisely remained schtum. There was food everywhere. I stacked half the cans in the bottom shelf of the food cupboard and the rest in the cupboard under the stairs, and tried to forget about them. The only other person I could
Nothing prepared me for the volume of food about to invade my home
face telling was my best friend, who suggested stashing it all in the shed. “Yes, but there’s no lock, and the neighbours can see it and I don’t have a rifle yet,” I half-joked.
Because, for all my contentment at having done something, I realised the whole project smacks of “I’m all right, Jack”. Sure, I’d taken care of my family, but what if a neighbour knocked on the door to ask for a can of beans? I still don’t know how it would all work.
Meanwhile, the great thing about a hobby like food prepping is, you’re never finished. I’m still picking up the odd carton of UHT milk, and now that I’ve achieved the level of Basic Food Prepper (fist pump), I’m on to working on luxuries; coffee pods, chocolate, wine, some frozen avocados…
Maybe this won’t be so bad after all…