It’s comforting to know we’re still good at the tradition of stockpiling
We live in jittery times, perpetually fearful of apocalypse – from environmental catastrophe, no-deal Brexit, and now coronavirus. Britons in particular love to prepare for end-times by stockpiling, something I put down to Blitz mentality.
According to a survey by Premium Credit finance providers, when the threat of no deal loomed particularly large last year, we spent some £4billion hoarding food, medicine, and other wares.
Coronavirus offers a novel spur to action. With the virus spreading daily, and the world on the brink of a pandemic, those worried about end-times conditions – mass quarantines, widespread infection, chaos in hospitals, cessation of public transport, inability to get to work and draw a paycheck – are now fully justified in taking robust measures.
The result is a boom time for James Blake, owner of Emergency Food Storage UK,
Europe’s largest emergency food supplier. More orders have been made in the last two weeks than in an ordinary six months for the company.
His customers, who have already cleaned out his main warehouse, evidently want to live out the worst in some degree of luxury – one month of food supplied by Blake’s outfit
will cost you £385 and supplies delicacies such as freeze-dried macaroni cheese, chicken tikka and chicken-fried rice. This approach certainly differs from that of my mother, who rang me up last week to urgently suggest I get in some “tins of beans, that kind of thing”. I was momentarily thrown into a funk imagining myself sitting in my flat for weeks on end, possibly very unwell, definitely lonely, with nothing but tinned beans to warm on the stove (if I could even light it).
For a nation that has come to be perpetually on edge, coronavirus appears to be the great legitimiser. Let’s just hope in the end all those freeze-dried chicken tikkas will remain untouched.