Off Our Trolleys: What Stockpiling In The Coronavirus Crisis Reveals ...

This is a piece about panic buying in the time of coronavirus, and maybe I should stop right there. None of us needs more panic in our lives right now. If there’s one thing psychologists can agree on, it’s that panicky behaviour is contagious. Every time we read an article telling us not to be selfish and ransack the supermarkets, it triggers the thought that food is running out and we must urgently get to the nearest Tesco and buy five packets of pasta and as many tinned tomatoes and lentils as we can carry.

These are certainly unsettled times in which to feed ourselves. Over the past month, we have been exposed to an uncanny sight that has been almost unknown in Britain for decades: empty supermarket shelves. When you are not used to it, this sight does strange things to your insides.

Two weeks ago, pre-lockdown, I popped to Sainsbury’s on the way home from school with my 11-year-old son. He drags his heels at shopping, but I assured him I only wanted to buy potatoes. I had everything else I needed for a shepherd’s pie. But we stopped in our tracks to see that there were no potatoes and indeed, no vegetables of any kind anywhere in the fresh produce aisle, except for a few sad packs of drooping mixed veg for stir fries. The locusts had been. I was aware that hand sanitiser and pasta and toilet roll were in short supply, but hadn’t realised that the fresh and frozen produce aisles were now emptying, too. I suddenly felt shaky. The last time I had seen a food shop with so little actual stuff in it relative to the shelves was on a school trip to Soviet Russia 30 years ago. My son’s eyes lit up: boring old food shopping had become a post-apocalyptic scavenger hunt. “Will frozen roast potatoes work in a shepherd’s pie?” he exclaimed in the near-empty wastes of the frozen food section.

What is generally called panic buying – a common human response to crisis – is not caused by food shortages per se, but by fear. At its root is a fear of scarcity, and this fear is self-fulfilling, because the more people anxiously stockpile, the more others get infected by the panic and the faster the food runs out. According to Steven Taylor, a clinical psychologist and author of The Psychology of Pandemics, which was published last year, there are parallels between the ways people are behaving now and the way they behaved during earlier pandemics such as the Spanish flu of 1918, when there was panic buying of Vicks VapoRub, and the 1968 flu pandemic, when food was looted from restaurants. The difference now, Taylor observes, is that the panic can escalate much faster via social media and online news.

“Inevitably, someone posts dramatic photographs of panic buying,” says Taylor. “This amplifies the sense of scarcity and perceived urgency, which leads to further panic buying.”

The American food writer Helen Rosner has noted an element of “fantasy” to the shoppers who fill entire trolleys with cases of mineral water, given that “staying at home for a few weeks isn’t quite nuclear holocaust”. We need to keep reminding ourselves that there is still generally plenty of food going around, even if it does not always reach the right people at the right time. Prof Tim Benton, who is research director for emerging risks at Chatham House, a London thinktank, told me that the UK has “full warehouses” of non-perishable food and that “the flow of fruit and vegetables from Europe is OK at the moment”, although distribution has clearly been made much more challenging by the spread of coronavirus in Spain and Italy, and the fact that lorries carrying fresh foods have been subject to more delays and checks than before. But there is still food in the shops. Rationally, we don’t need to panic.

But who said the human relationship with food was fully rational? Many people reacted to news of the virus by rushing to the shops, as if the prospect of running low on coffee beans were more terrifying than the risk of exposing yourself or others to infection. One of these people was me. Along with a couple of extra bags of coffee, I stocked up on ground almonds for my daughter who loves to bake; and lemons because they improve everything.