Earlier this year Sweden’s government delivered leaflets to 4.8m Swedish households, inviting them to consider how they could best cope in a situation of “major strain … in which society’s normal services are not working as they usually do”. The government had in mind all kinds of crises – natural disasters, terrorism, cyber attacks, all-out war – but the basic survival strategy for all of them was the food hoard.
The leaflet recommended that every home lay down a stock of non-perishables: specifically breadstuffs with a long shelf-life (the leaflet mentioned tortillas and crackers), dried lentils and beans, tinned hummus and sardines, ravioli, rice, instant mashed potato, energy bars – and an old Swedish favourite “rosehip soup”, presumably to remind families huddled in the candlelight of their sun-dappled days in the forest.
Switzerland has long had a similar sense of foreboding: legislation passed in the cold war still demands that every citizen has access to a nuclear shelter. But the list of recommended foods to be kept in the larder (or bunker) in case the worst happens is, as one would expect of Switzerland, more thorough. “Tick the items you need on the following list … and ensure that you always have them in stock” is the advice of the Swiss civil defence authorities. The list begins with nine litres of water per person (for an emergency lasting three or four days) and continues through pepper and salt, dry sausage, dried fruit and pulses, tinned meat and fish, hard cheese, pet food and condensed milk – to reach a sweet conclusion with sugar, jam, honey and crispbread. There is no allowance for the kind of nostalgia that rosehip soup caters to in the Swedish list, though chocolate does get a line to itself. Neither country mentions alcohol, the obvious solace.
The question is: should British households be stocking up similarly in case a Brexit deal falls through? Dominic Raab, the newly appointed minister for tinned sardines and condensed milk, suggests everything is under control. There will be a deal, probably, but just in case there isn’t one he is expecting the food industry – which means the supermarkets – to build up reserves, rather as power stations built up the coal heaps that kept the lights on and saw off the miners in 1984. As James Ball pointed out this week, a food supply based on just-in-time deliveries could make this a tricky proposition – even if the government has some empty refrigerated warehouses up its sleeve. In the words of the British Retail Consortium: “Stockpiling of food is not a practical response to a no-deal on Brexit and [the] industry has not been approached by government to begin planning for this … our food supply chains are extremely fragile.”
There is also the question of trust. Do we trust the most inept British government in living memory to look after our interests; or should we look after ourselves, as government ministers such as Raab, with his long-embedded libertarian convictions, would surely think right?
This is dangerous territory. In 1940, under defence regulation 18B, a person might have gone to jail for aiding the enemy by advocating hoarding and therefore spreading fear and alarm; and 1940 is Raab’s kind of year. As he wrote in the Daily Mail this week, imagining himself under a tin hat with a cigar, “While there are a few who might wallow in pessimism or have us cower in a corner at this historic crossroads, I am confident Britain’s best days lie ahead … because I am stubbornly optimistic about our country, and I am confident in our people.”
Personal hoarding seems craven behaviour in the face of this Churchillian talk, and yet when other developments are taken into consideration, it appears the only sensible response. In Northern Ireland, for example, plans have been made to requisition thousands of electricity generators from the army – flying them home if necessary from Afghanistan – in the event that the Republic withdraws from the island of Ireland’s shared energy market. The generators will sit aboard barges moored in Belfast Lough or off the coasts of counties Antrim and Down (the details are unclear), ready to replace electricity supplies from the south if a no-deal Brexit looms.
The countries of continental Europe likely to be most affected are also prepared. The Netherlands is hiring nearly 1,000 customs officials, while France has a plan to recruit 700. The port of Calais has already bought a 42-acre site that could house new inspection posts and warehouses, and help to solve the problem of a shortage of space in Dover.
In the context of such large-scale official planning, a little panic buying seems no more than prudent. Where I live, people have begun to talk about the possibility of this, if not actually going down to their cellars to make space available for the rations that will see them through the crisis until the first shipments of American chicken arrive.
Survival – having enough to eat – is obviously the primary reason, but a secondary one is that a no-deal Brexit will mean a sharp rise in the price of items that have Europe as their main or only source. The imposition of tariffs and the likely collapse of sterling will mean that olive oil and wine will never again be as cheap. A middle-class way of life that began in the 1960s may be coming to an end.
What other non-perishables – taking wine and olive oil for granted – should British survivalists keep in their cellars? A survey conducted of my own household suggests rice, pasta, tinned tomatoes, tinned sardines, tinned fruit and vegetables, breakfast cereals, flour, sugar, tea, coffee, dried beans and pulses, cat food, and garlic and onions (perishable, but only in the long term). A worthy list, to which for my own sake I would add corned beef, mustard and HP sauce.
In 1940, such a list would have looked look very different. To most, rice was a milk pudding, and pasta either a rumour or baked macaroni cheese. Olive oil came in miniature bottles from chemists’ shops. Garlic was the smell that assailed you, years later, when you stepped from the train at the Gare du Nord. Tinned spaghetti in tomato sauce made only a slight adjustment to this absence of the continental when it was introduced in the 1950s, to be heaped on toast like baked beans. As a child of the 1940s, I remember its pleasurable slipperiness, as well as the delightful taste that I now recognise came basically from sugar and tomatoes.
Earlier in my childhood, food had often been an enemy, with a rationed scarcity that found a devious expression in the gristle of meat stews and ice cream made of unlikely ingredients, which once or twice made me ill. My mother made good potato pie and omelettes whisked from powdered egg, as foamy as the head on a Guinness, but like many children of that generation my head was turned by tins, whose contents promised no surprises or threats. Peach halves, the little leaves of mandarin oranges, sausages and baked beans, sardines, salmon, frankfurters: throughout the 1950s and 60s, the tin steadily expanded our gastronomic horizon.
It would be ridiculous to imagine that we could ever return to the austere 1940s. Or would it? These days, it is hard to be sure of anything.
