You know that things are looking seriously bad when American observers start advising Americans to hoard food. This is the
country of the footlong sandwich
and the one-pound hamburger with fries and pickles on the side, the land of limitless options and limitless spending, the land of milk and honey where milk used to cost less than $2 per gallon and people rarely spent more than 8 per cent of their monthly income on food. So hoarding for any short term crisis seems so...oh dear, so Third World! But if rice and wheat prices keep moving the way they do, then perhaps that's what people here will have to start doing, loading up the pantry, that is. The era of food complacency is over.
I feel really bad because I know the drill of the economy of shortages - use less of everything, buy things only when you need to, reuse everything as far as possible. But to most people here, those routines are so alien that they will have a hard time adjusting, or maybe the much vaunted American adaptibility will rear its head again. Who knows?
This is a good one, I think many other western countries are in the same boat there though, very few people even in Eurpe seem to realise that the wasting ear is gone, and I wonder how many people from my generation have heard about a pantry or do stock up on non-perishable goods the way my parents or grand parents used to.
ReplyDeleteEggs here are now 35 per cent higher in cost than last year! Yikes! The problem though with long term storage is - how to do it. How does one store rice, wheat, etc, to last for 4-5 years? That is part of the reason why even with a looming food crisis, people are not stocking up on non-perishables.
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