The Prepping Thread - A Newer Beginning ;)

GreyQueen

VeganLois said:

I wholeheartedly agree with the grow your own movement but life is not as simple as that is it?  Lots of people do not have a garden and allotments are being built on....well everywhere is going to be built on 😊.  We will have less agricultural land and therefore have to rely further on imports.  I fail to see how this is progress.  I am well stocked already but eventually that supply will deplete by which time prices will have rocketed, and I will have to sell a kidney to pay my shopping bill.

I wouldn't worry about it overmuch. Politicians know very well, across the world and since the beginning of recorded history, that expensive/ scarce food = rioting populations. And overthrown regimes. Every effort will be made to keep food affordable.

There is an awful lot of private garden land idling in the UK, wasted under lawns, imprisoned under decking, hidden under gravel and brickweave. It is a rich society which can afford to be so profligate with its land; peasant cultures have more sense.

We also use considerable amounts of agricultural land sub-optimally, growing barley for brewing and sugarbeet for sugar and as an ingredient in animal feed (sugar is a terrible metabolic poison). A stunning amount of our produce never even reaches the consumer because it fails arbitary beauty standards. We waste a lot of water irrigating potato crops to produce spuds of very particular dimensions to be made into crisps, a bad nutritional choice and a diabolical waste of resources; land, water, fertiliser, petrochemicals for packaging, trucks to transport it.

Countries which produce climate-specific crops produce a lot more than they can consume. Take the island of Crete. Cretans have told me several times that their island has 30 million olive trees ALL IN PRIVATE OWNERSHIP. And half a million residents. Ratios like this are why Greece as a whole is the world's 3rd largest producer of olive oil and why there will still be affordable olives and affordable olive oil on British shelves. Heck, you could buy them here in Roman times. I don't expect the EU to make it impossible or impossibly expensive to buy either of them here, because it would hurt EU member countries more than it would hurt UK consumers. If my 50p jar of Liddly olives had a price increase of 50% it would still only be a 75p jar of olives. I eat one jar most weeks. I could make that one jar a fortnight or no jars at all, and the Europeans know that fine well.

And I'm gobsmacked that anyone would buy Cheddar from abroad when it is one of our native cheeses. The beef I eat is all British and as for cucumbers, I gave up eating them when I twigged it was an expensive and tasteless way of buying water.

euronorris

Our T delivery due any minute. Didn't have any problems with ordering, but we'll see if there are any substitutions. I suspect that sherry being low on stock is people stocking up for xmas and/or making Xmas treats that need time to mature.

Studies now confirming the positive impact of vitamin d on both infection levels and outcomes, so urging the public to start taking a supplement. I ordered DDs top up of it yesterday, and already struggled to find stock. Won't be long before that is out of stock, so if you want some, act sooner rather than later.

I'm not a fan of olives, though i do use olive oil in cooking. Cucumbers though, I love them! Used to have cucumber sandwiches as a kid! Lol

daz378

My new frost free freezer  is being delivered  between  11 am and 3 pm...ive been taking zinc  and a multivitamin tablet since march...i have some  stock of vitamins to fall on   but do need to stock up....stay safe

euronorris

Shopping delivered. Only 3 subs. 2 worked in our favour. Ordered a 12 pack of loo roll, subbed for a 16 pack for same price. Bluberries subbed for a larger pack for same price, and maom sweets subbed for a different pack of maom sweets for same weight and price.
So no issues as such here, but we probably aren't an average household shop. There's only 3 of us, this wasn't a big shop for us anyway (just a top up), and even a big shop for us is usually under 80 items. Appreciate it must be very difficult for larger families, or those shopping for others as well as themselves.

MingVase

"It is a rich society which can afford to be so profligate with its land; peasant cultures have more sense."

Greyqueen, that is the quote of the century. And spot on!

Greenglockenspiel

Email from sainsbugs saying they are substituting the own brand chopped tomatoes I ordered with KTC ones - wonder if that is due to panic buying? I buy them every week as we go through so many. Different scent hand soap coming too, but that doesn’t matter, and no spinach. That one definitely won’t be due to stockpiling!

Thriftygifty

They sent the beans hurah! X3 4pks although sugar free. Sherry was x2 1 ltr sub for x2 0.75 not 3 as my previous post, I miss typed. As long as we have food of some kind i'm really not to worried. I feel for the people that have people/children who can't be so flexible for various reasons. I'm restarting the milk person next week but only a couple of pints to just play safe. 

VeganLois

Thank you GreyQueen for your assurances - you make some very credible points.  My kidney will not need to be sold just yet 😊.  It just seems that in my locale, Warwickshire, property developers’ greed is superseding sense.  Anyway, no more politics.

i am wondering if the panic buying is as widespread as they’re making it out to be.  I went to Aldi in a Cotswold town yesterday.  Very civilised, no panic buying, no shortages..... This is in direct contrast to a visit to Mr T in Banbury earlier this week where all the usual items were flying out of the door.  There were a significant number of shelf stackers - more than you would expect at that  time of day.  

MrsCD

On Monday I did my initial A$da order, to book the slot on Thursday. My Dad fancied some lentil soup for a change so I put a couple of tins in the order. Tuesday, I added both DD's orders to ours and Dad's, only to be told the soup wasn't available. So I changed them to lentil and bacon soup. Thursday morning I got the email receipt, with a sub for the lentil and bacon soup. Guess what? The sub was what I had wanted in the first place! You just couldn't make it up. 😅

Si_Clist

GreyQueen said:

I wouldn't worry about it overmuch. Politicians know very well, across the world and since the beginning of recorded history, that expensive/ scarce food = rioting populations. And overthrown regimes. Every effort will be made to keep food affordable ...

Even at the expense making it ever-more difficult for British farmers to make an honest living.  But hey, at least TPTB had the good sense to do away with the crossbars at the top of lampposts so we can't so easily string 'em up when the time comes.

You're spot on about all the land going under decking and paving too.  No sooner had they sold the last house in the select development of designer homes little ghetto at the back of us than the inmates started tarmacking the grass areas outside their bijou homettes in order to provide more parking for their enormobiles.  And once they'd done that, having presumably been much taken originally with the birdies and the squirrels and the bats in the semi-rural wonderland to which they'd moved, they of course started getting the tree surgeons in to drop the nasty trees that dropped leaves about the place and let pigeons roost in them and poop on their cars.

Meanwhile, my Lady Wife, who is busy with the Annual Seed Sort Out, has just announced that her oldest packet of viable seed is dated 2002.  And upon me being surprised to learn that, has now informed me that the kale, the sprouts and the sprouting broccoli at present growing in the garden are all from seed that's ten years old ...