Back when swine flu was a gathering menace, I did what seemed a clever thing. I went straight to the supermarket, and spent two weeks’ worth of grocery money on food that, in a pinch, could last our family of seven for a month.
As I pushed a cart loaded with dried beans, rice, and frugal canned victuals through the aisles, it seemed odd that one else appeared worried. Every other customer was cheerfully buying perishables, not stockpiling for the apocalypse.
When I stopped to ask a supermarket employee about UHT milk, the European stuff that comes in tetra-pak boxes and has longer life than a sea turtle, the fellow pointed helpfully. “And it’s even on sale,” he said.
“Well that’s handy,” I told him, “Because I’m stocking up in case we have to do what Mexico City’s doing, and stay home to wait out the swine flu.”
“Oh, yeah,” he said, “I think I heard something about that.”
At that point, I began to feel a bit silly. It wasn’t that I really believed the flu would strike so violently as to destroy the modern food chain. Yet who knew?
If catastrophe were to hit, interstate trucking might grind to a halt; farmers might be unable to harvest crops; supermarkets might not be able to restock.
Plus, anyone who’s ever read Stephen King’s “The Stand,” in which a deadly flu lays waste to the populace, may be forgiven for recalling with a shudder certain scary post-outbreak passages.
I was still on the hunt for long-lasting provisions when my eye fell upon a heap of enormous green cabbages. Cabbage would be just the thing! It lasts for ages and would provide plenty of vitamin C if fresh fruit couldn’t be had. Into the shopping cart they went.
Thankfully, as we all know, the disease renamed “2009 H1N1 Influenza A Virus” seems to have fizzled out as a public health threat almost as quickly as it flared up.
As the threat began to wane, people here have begun laughing a bit about how worried they’d been. A suburban friend admitted to ordering germ-barring face-masks on the Internet for the same reason I was hoarding legumes: “If the flu really hit, I figured someone would have to go to the supermarket,” she explained.
The breathless reaction of American cable TV now seems to have been gross overreaction. So was the extreme and probably disingenuous precautions taken by Russia (which banned imports of U.S. meats) and Egypt (which ordered wholesale slaughter of the country’s pig stocks).
And then – suddenly! – the virus struck home. This week our family awoke to learn that school had been closed following the discovery of a probable case of H1N1 amongst the faculty.
So for the past few days the house has been seething with children, all of whom seem to be in rude good health and none of whom has shown the slightest interest in snacking on cabbage.
Never mind, said my mask-buying friend consolingly, at least you’ve now got provisions that will last indefinitely. When flu hits next winter, she said, one household in our neighborhood will be prepared.
It was then that I was struck by an awful, half-comical thought: The UHT milk had been on sale. Now, let us ask ourselves, why would a supermarket put a long-life product on drastic mark-down?
I raced to the pantry and pulled a milk-filled brick from the great wall of them. What do you know? The whole vast supply of the stuff expires… in July.
Examiner columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon is a former foreign correspondent and a regular contributor to the books pages of The Wall Street Journal. Her Examiner column appears on Thursdays.
