Quite where to begin with this one . A few days ago I joined a facebook group for UK preppers , seemed a nice enough helpful bunch, ive belonged to a good few US groups of a similar vain , once again helpful useful contacts and ive learned a lot from them about shelf lives and what you can and cant store long term , Now I do bulk shop quite a lot mainly because we live in a food dessert here and were very rural , plenty of acerage of veg around us but nothing but the occasional Coop or Spar type shop available for everything else or online shop . Ive noticed for the last few weeks that theres not much stock of basic items in the few local stores , didnt really put two and two together till i joined this UK prepper group and realised that the panic buying for Brexit has begun .
There were people posting there £500 tin shops , moaning about finding places to store stuff , yesterday the first time ive ventured out into Lincoln itself I noticed a woman in the Poundshop just sweep an entire shelf of Fray Bentos pies into her basket , it took 5 shops to manage to buy Ibuprofen yesterday , its the weird gaps in the shelves you notice .
Read the UK site yesterday and someone said the government wont provide pet food and will tell you to destroy your pets , this did actually happen during the First World War so today i would imagine that will all go missing from the shelves .
The most disturbing posts ive seen are the people wholesale buying food to sell it a profit if Brexit goes tits up . Yes we know its all a bit Millennium Bug and people will believe any pap they read on the internet. But in the back of your mind theres a realisation that our Government are a total shower of shit who can organise nothing , so what do you do ?
Well i may plant extra beans this year and ive stuffed a few garlic bublets in a plant pot , I remembered the big food shortage of WWII was onions of all things , they still mainly come from Spain , so ive got a couple of bags of dried ones in ...ho hum we live in the countryside and are surrounded by cabbages and leeks we will get by , but what happens in the cities when the energy drinks run out?
£500 worth of tins!! crazy. I wouldn't eat that much tinned food in 5 years!
ReplyDeleteI'm hardly a "prepper" but I do believe in being prepared for emergencies and most governments now suggest 3 weeks worth of supplies to look after yourself and your family. The thinking is that even if your area is fine, you being self-sufficient means that they can concentrate on dealing with the emergency (floods in the maritimes, forest fires in Alberta or an earthquake in Vancouver).
ReplyDeleteEurope won't suddenly stop selling you stuff - the problem will be in the transport of those goods and getting everything through customs and that's why gaps on those store shelves will appear.
A couple of months ago I went to do my weekly shop and found that two of the stores I usually shop at had hardly any meat (same parent Co.) - I checked with my brother who works for them and discovered that there had been a computer glitch at their main warehouse and hundreds of stores hadn't received their meat orders and it took a few days to get things sorted.
I live in a small 1 bedroom apt. but I can easily stock 2 months worth of food for just myself and I only have the freezer above my apt. sized fridge so it is doable but I think you need to be sensible and think about what you actually need and will use. I think I would concentrate on a few tins of a variety of foods and then think about imports such as olive oil, pasta and rice, things that the UK might not produce.
If I was in the UK right now I'd assess my current pantry, fill in some gaps, add those imported items and ensure that I had baking supplies on hand plus a few treats (always helpful) and call it a day. I wouldn't be buying 500 tins of tuna and I CERTAINLY wouldn't be going on TV and telling everyone how much stuff I have - that I think is crazy and would make you an instant target - just stupid!
As there's no council tax to pay in Feb and March, I'm using some of that to stock up more. I've been adding to my 'Brexit cupboard' for a while now. It's all food that we like and will eat whether the shtf or not. When we had snow last March shelves were empty in the shops, just because of a few days bad weather. Things will be much worse if lorries are queueing for who knows how long. I don't trust this government with anything, and don't expect they'll be able to organise food supplies any better than anything else that they've cocked up over the years. I'd rather take responsibility for my family ( some of whom I regularly provide food parcels to), be prepared, and be able to eat what I want to eat, rather than the bits that will be left on the shelves if it all goes tits up.
ReplyDeleteGreat post Kate, very informative. We've been shopping this morning and there were lots of gaps on the shelves...this has been happening for a while but is definitely getting more pronounced recently, we've found. We have good stocks and I'm sure we could manage just fine for a few weeks in the event of an emergency. Slightly worrying news about dog food though - although I do make around half of our dog's food and generally have a good stock in the freezer, so even she would be ok.
ReplyDeleteIt will probably wall bed like the millennium when doom was the forecast of the day. In reality nothing. The lorries are only going to be held up for so long, they need to trade with us before we look for alternatives!
ReplyDeleteThere were empty shelves yesterday in our local store, I had made the presumption that this was due to cancellations on the Ferry. I generally have extra in due to any bad weather.
ReplyDeleteMadness, as if running out of pet food is a national emergency. Preppers are causing the shortages, how selfish, just stick to U.K. grown veg, forget the meat and alcohol, not a priority, all this scaremongering plays on the minds of vulnerable people.
ReplyDeleteWe have been buying a few extra things every week since last October, just in case.
ReplyDeleteI think that there will be some disruption for a few weeks, but less than people expect. Firms like Tesco and Amazon will not want to risk losing money, so they will find a way to get some stuff on the shelves so they can extract pennies from us. I've not noticed so much with online shopping, but who knows?
ReplyDeleteWow - I haven't heard much about people panic-buying. Maybe it's because I'm in Scotland and I doubt we hear nearly as much about brexit as elsewhere in the UK. I'm not aware of any shelves being emptied. I tend to think that any shortages will result from the panic-buying itself.
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