Reflections on Our COVID Scare: Food Inventory

One of the most stressful aspects of the lockdown has been managing the food inventory. Very early on in the pandemic I was actually shocked by the account of a prominent Washington DC person who said that she had been going to Whole Foods every single day. By contrast, our family decided we would send me out once every ten days to our basic grocery store, with an occasional supplementary run to Trader Joe's. We shifted that strategy a little bit when it became clear that there were COVID outbreaks in meatpacking plants across the country and the meat supply was threatened. I stopped buying meat at the grocery store and started going to local butchers whose meat sources are out of the factory food chain.

This approach was meant to minimize the chances of our catching or sharing the virus, but it had some real downsides. Something you wanted but not at the store? Then you're out of luck until your next ten-day run (yeast, flour, I'm looking at you). We don't drink a lot of milk these days, but we do use it as an ingredient. A half gallon might run out in 24 hours if the kids decided to make a lot of pudding. But our last gallon went bad before we finished it. And the actual trips to the store have been enormous runs, taking multiple grocery carts and multiple hours.

The issue with being quarantined, instead of just conservatively cooperating with the lockdown, however, is that you don't have any warning that it's coming. You can't decide that on Saturday you're going to stay inside for 14 days and go to the grocery store now. If you have active reason to believe that you might be contagious, you can't just mask up and go out to prepare. You have a moral obligation to stay home starting immediately. The quarantine order just falls on you.

The news from our doctor that we should quarantine came about halfway through our 10-day grocery cycle. That meant we were still good for a while, but that we couldn't go out and replenish the stuff that was going to run out during our quarantine. Did I have enough meat (probably)? Milk? No, definitely not. Flour and yeast? This gave me the most anxiety, since my family has been devouring homemade bagels and loaves of oatmeal/flour bread at the rate of about one batch every 36 hours.

I got especially worried when I realized that in our case, it was both the adults who were potentially contagious. Of course we wanted to protect our kids. But could we really hand over responsibility to them for feeding themselves and us for a two-week period? If we were actively feverish in the bedroom, I don't think we would have had a choice. But my husband and I did continue to be in charge of cooking for them and ourselves on a regular basis, and I did keep kneading the dough (hoping that cooking would kill any virus). I just hoped that if we got truly sick, there was enough canned soup and rice in the house for the children to feed themselves. I worried particularly about my picky eater, who started off lockdown cooperatively eating whatever was offered but has backed off of that in the past month. I asked her sister what they would have done about eating if we got sick, and she told me today that "[she] probably would have yelled at [her] sister a lot."

This is hard to manage, and stressful. I see now that I absolutely have to have a fourteen-day supply of food on hand at all times, just in case. I'm grateful to be wealthy enough to keep a well-stocked pantry, to have older children who can manage the stove and oven, for the previous owners of this house who let us keep their backup basement fridge.