There were empty shelves because of panic buying. That's just the public for you I know what can you do but don't forget a lot of these people also voted for Brexit so we can't make any calls on their intelligence or common sense.
There were empty shelves then and there may very well be empty shelves again.
People called 999 when KFC ran short
Food shortages due to Brexit will not be met with stoicism
How many people did? Did 17.4 million people call 999 due to KFC ?
The UK did react to food shortages with stoicism as recently as March. We got through it and life went on.
I don't think you realise how hand to mouth - and how dependent on processed food - a lot of families are because of cash and time pressures. Not being able to get a pizza, for instance, can disrupt plans and routines. That is what is being ignored in the discussion, I think.
given half the UK is being told to stay at home where are the time pressures ? You cant actually go anywhere much except the supermarket.
People have to go to work and children to school. It's common to have a family with the children home and hungry at 5pm, and one adult not till 7, and so on ...
Meals such as pizzas and so on help a lot, but if they cannot be obtained reliably ... it will be interesting to see what happens.
I take it you cant cook.
Knocking up a hot meal is a doddle whatever your budget.
So long as you like risotto.
(The ultimate 50p meal.)
couscous or noodles are the fastest thing youll cook aside from bread and wraps
My favourite quick and cheap meal is an omelette. It is dead easy and if you do it right, a sophisticated dish.
Toast and marmite with scrambled eggs on top. A bit of cheese on top of the toast that melts on impact with the hot egg if you are feeling particularly sophisticated.
I've started working through the skills tests from Masterchef.
Next One: Crepe Suzette (ie pancake with orange juice and a lighter.)
There were empty shelves because of panic buying. That's just the public for you I know what can you do but don't forget a lot of these people also voted for Brexit so we can't make any calls on their intelligence or common sense.
There were empty shelves then and there may very well be empty shelves again.
People called 999 when KFC ran short
Food shortages due to Brexit will not be met with stoicism
How many people did? Did 17.4 million people call 999 due to KFC ?
The UK did react to food shortages with stoicism as recently as March. We got through it and life went on.
I don't think you realise how hand to mouth - and how dependent on processed food - a lot of families are because of cash and time pressures. Not being able to get a pizza, for instance, can disrupt plans and routines. That is what is being ignored in the discussion, I think.
given half the UK is being told to stay at home where are the time pressures ? You cant actually go anywhere much except the supermarket.
People have to go to work and children to school. It's common to have a family with the children home and hungry at 5pm, and one adult not till 7, and so on ...
Meals such as pizzas and so on help a lot, but if they cannot be obtained reliably ... it will be interesting to see what happens.
I take it you cant cook.
Knocking up a hot meal is a doddle whatever your budget.
So long as you like risotto.
(The ultimate 50p meal.)
Most of our risotto rice comes from Italy.
And where is the protein to come from? It can't all come from rice.
You might just be stretching your argument.
Not so much protein in rice.
That is the point I am making - more protein is needed. Eggs? Cheese? Milk?
Protein from all the lamb beef and fish we are told we wont be able to export anymore
At 50p a meal, as stipulated by an earlier poster?
I'm already doing my best to eat as much local sheep and fish as it is ...
Edit: but not trying to be rude. Your point is a good one, generally.
Not for the last 5 years plus. Aldi are just another supermarket when it comes to the majority of their products - they have a central buying team, stores are laid out to a "planogram" showing which product where and of how many facings. They do have food special buys but mostly in ambient in the centre aisle.
As for Aldi and the union flags, they are a great champion for British sourcing. But so many of those british made products use imported ingredients / packaging. Many of the shortages we saw earlier this year were because there was a national shortage of plastic film used to form the bag that so many kinds of product come in. Almost all of the raw plastic used by UK packaging producers is imported. As are foil trays for produce and fresh foods. And don't get me started on the supply situation for wooden pallets...
Can I ask a purely practical question? I have been very gradually building up supplies of food for the last 18 months (since Johnson became PM), and I reckon I have enough for 3-4 months. There are just 3 things which I don't have so much of: Milk Bread Root vegetables
I can't see any reason why those should be in short supply, but would be interested in what those more expert then me think?
Milk will freeze. Milk is pretty much a domestic product of course but as part of a wider agriculture supply chain which is at risk of significant disruption. I doubt we will run out milk when we were literally pouring it down the drain by the millions of litres back in the early summer. We may well run out of cartons to stick in in though... Bread. Depends on the wheat harvest - which this year was catastrophic (-40% of normal). Which means imports needed at scale... Root Vegetables. Frankly this is an area where Brexit can help farming as too much gets imported to save pennies on UK grown. However as with so many other sectors what people like to eat and what we're capable of growing have diverged - far less demand for things like Turnips...
If we get No Deal - which is starting to look horrifying possible - then the pressure for Boris to resign will be formidable. It will amount to the greatest political failure in modern British history, making Black Wednesday look like a pasty tax in comparison. There will be absolutely no reason, either for himself or anyone else, for Boris to hang around a moment longer.
Not sure. We have now normalised empty shelves via Covid. Plus no one* will notice the extra administrative burden, to whatever degree it manifests itself, save for a "weren't these Stroopwafels a bit cheaper last week" type of thing. So there is a lot of leeway for absolute total fuck up that Boris can paint as near-normal.
I have been prominent on here saying he will go (I have nine more months of my bet to run) on the basis of logic. It was obvious from the moment that TMay took office that she was manifestly unfit for it and hence was, to quote a noted newspaper editor, a "dead man walking".
Boris is equally unfit to be PM. And he will fall. Just not in 24-hr rolling news time. People who are manifestly unfit for high office generally don't stay as PM for that long. cf J Corbyn.
That said, he does look sticky because all his failings are often waved away as the behaviour of a lovable scallywag.
*no one apart those who are filling out the forms and adhering to the new system, obvs.
Ordinarily he and many of his cabinet colleagues would have been marched out of office by now. Lying and corruption aren't usually politically survivable, yet the bar to serve in a senior role appears to be having been sacked for one or the other previously.
People won't realise how bad this is until it slaps them in the face. Customs checks whether under a deal or WTO will bring the UK supply chain to a crashing halt. When it gets untangled we'll find that we're paying a lot more for less things and every retailer and manufacturer and supplier will be saying why, intercut with the reporters embedded with the 48 hour queues to cross the channel.
"This isn't the Brexit we voted for" - big price rises, mass shortages, mass unemployment. You can't hide the impacts of the end of the free market and free customs, or blame it on the other party, or positively spin it as better than what we had. As reality collapses in on people Johnson will be gone. At speed.
There usually needs to be a catalyst and your final paragraph paints a reasonably possible picture of that catalyst. But as I said we have had empty shelves in very recent memory so I'm not 100% sure he won't have a get out.
There is another factor that means we won't have empty shelves - supermarkets are quite deliberately dynamic. If a produce is unavailable and won't be available for a while they don't generally just put an "out of stock" label on its spot and leave that bit of their shelving empty - they fill the space with something else. They put a different product up instead, or they fill in with other products that would be next to it instead. So the shelves remain "full" (depending upon normal variance of how recently they were restocked) even if products are "unavailable".
If Rochdale wants to say I am wrong then let him say how I am wrong and why.
EG am I wrong and does his supermarket deliberately leave shelves empty when a stock is unavailable for a significant period of time or am I right and the supermarket will change the tickets and put different stock on the shelves instead?
Phil this is what the real world looked like earlier this year.
Thanks to panic buying which stopped in a matter of days because then people had full fridges and freezers. Its a self-correcting problem that can't go on forever.
Exactly. I appreciate it when you agree with something rather than try to argue the opposite. Thanks.
There were empty shelves because of panic buying. That's just the public for you I know what can you do but don't forget a lot of these people also voted for Brexit so we can't make any calls on their intelligence or common sense.
There were empty shelves then and there may very well be empty shelves again.
Yes if people react to no deal with panic buying then there may be some empty shelves for a few days while people panic buy.
Then people's fridges and freezers will be full and they will stop panic buying and the supermarkets will have full shelves again. Just a few days later.
Exactly as happened earlier this year. We didn't go for months with empty shelves, nor will we for months or years to come post-Brexit.
If people start panic buying in the first week of January do you think come the May elections we will still have empty shelves and panic buying going on? Don't be ridiculous! 🤦🏻♂️
You just don't understand the supply chain.
We saw an initial blitzing of certain product categories - Pasta, Toilet Rolls, Paracetamol where people went mad and bought stuff they didn't need. After that we saw major shortage across a significant number of categories caused by the major modal shift in how people eat. The lockdown closed pubs and restaurants and workspaces - all the meals that used to be eaten out were now eaten at home. Pack formats became a major issue - there wasn't a shortage in beans but there was a shortage in retail cans and a surplus of huuuuge catering cans.
Retailers were working flat out as were manufacturers trying to respond to wild swings in demand with a supply chain full of holes. Through this longer phase the gaps were not caused by panic buying at all - they were caused by supply chain disruption. We are about to have a major supply chain disruption which will cause not just short term inability to move products / materials but a long term need to try and restructure what comes from where and when.
Manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers - all expecting long term issues and price rises. What do they know about it...
Yes there will be disruption, again no shit Sherlock, I have always said there will be disruption.
The invisible hand will work its magic and we will adjust. Some things may become a bit more expensive, some things may become a bit cheaper and some customers will substitute from more expensive goods to cheaper ones - and life will go on. The wheel of time will turn.
I do not understand how at your claimed age of approx 40 (I think) you have so little understanding of the basics of how the world works. Why not spend just half an hour in a supermarket looking at the little labels on things which tell you their country of origin? Or consider this rather succinct list from wikipedia, and factor in the concept that all crops are seasonal?
"Crops commonly grown in the United Kingdom include cereals, chiefly wheat, oats and barley; root vegetables, chiefly potatoes and sugar beet; pulse crops such as beans or peas; forage crops such as cabbages, vetches, rape and kale; fruit, particularly apples and pears; and hay for animal feed."
Trade isn't going to halt though. Trade will still happen even if it is disrupted.
But yes for a couple of weeks if we are disrupted it's perfect possible to live off potatoes, root vegetables, peas, beans, cabbages, apples, lamb, seafood etc.
But it won't be necessary. It is panic mongering to suggest it would be. Disruption doesn't mean an end to trade, it never has done.
If we get No Deal - which is starting to look horrifying possible - then the pressure for Boris to resign will be formidable. It will amount to the greatest political failure in modern British history, making Black Wednesday look like a pasty tax in comparison. There will be absolutely no reason, either for himself or anyone else, for Boris to hang around a moment longer.
Not sure. We have now normalised empty shelves via Covid. Plus no one* will notice the extra administrative burden, to whatever degree it manifests itself, save for a "weren't these Stroopwafels a bit cheaper last week" type of thing. So there is a lot of leeway for absolute total fuck up that Boris can paint as near-normal.
I have been prominent on here saying he will go (I have nine more months of my bet to run) on the basis of logic. It was obvious from the moment that TMay took office that she was manifestly unfit for it and hence was, to quote a noted newspaper editor, a "dead man walking".
Boris is equally unfit to be PM. And he will fall. Just not in 24-hr rolling news time. People who are manifestly unfit for high office generally don't stay as PM for that long. cf J Corbyn.
That said, he does look sticky because all his failings are often waved away as the behaviour of a lovable scallywag.
*no one apart those who are filling out the forms and adhering to the new system, obvs.
Ordinarily he and many of his cabinet colleagues would have been marched out of office by now. Lying and corruption aren't usually politically survivable, yet the bar to serve in a senior role appears to be having been sacked for one or the other previously.
People won't realise how bad this is until it slaps them in the face. Customs checks whether under a deal or WTO will bring the UK supply chain to a crashing halt. When it gets untangled we'll find that we're paying a lot more for less things and every retailer and manufacturer and supplier will be saying why, intercut with the reporters embedded with the 48 hour queues to cross the channel.
"This isn't the Brexit we voted for" - big price rises, mass shortages, mass unemployment. You can't hide the impacts of the end of the free market and free customs, or blame it on the other party, or positively spin it as better than what we had. As reality collapses in on people Johnson will be gone. At speed.
There usually needs to be a catalyst and your final paragraph paints a reasonably possible picture of that catalyst. But as I said we have had empty shelves in very recent memory so I'm not 100% sure he won't have a get out.
There is another factor that means we won't have empty shelves - supermarkets are quite deliberately dynamic. If a produce is unavailable and won't be available for a while they don't generally just put an "out of stock" label on its spot and leave that bit of their shelving empty - they fill the space with something else. They put a different product up instead, or they fill in with other products that would be next to it instead. So the shelves remain "full" (depending upon normal variance of how recently they were restocked) even if products are "unavailable".
If Rochdale wants to say I am wrong then let him say how I am wrong and why.
EG am I wrong and does his supermarket deliberately leave shelves empty when a stock is unavailable for a significant period of time or am I right and the supermarket will change the tickets and put different stock on the shelves instead?
Phil this is what the real world looked like earlier this year.
Thanks to panic buying which stopped in a matter of days because then people had full fridges and freezers. Its a self-correcting problem that can't go on forever.
Exactly. I appreciate it when you agree with something rather than try to argue the opposite. Thanks.
There were empty shelves because of panic buying. That's just the public for you I know what can you do but don't forget a lot of these people also voted for Brexit so we can't make any calls on their intelligence or common sense.
There were empty shelves then and there may very well be empty shelves again.
Yes if people react to no deal with panic buying then there may be some empty shelves for a few days while people panic buy.
Then people's fridges and freezers will be full and they will stop panic buying and the supermarkets will have full shelves again. Just a few days later.
Exactly as happened earlier this year. We didn't go for months with empty shelves, nor will we for months or years to come post-Brexit.
If people start panic buying in the first week of January do you think come the May elections we will still have empty shelves and panic buying going on? Don't be ridiculous! 🤦🏻♂️
You just don't understand the supply chain.
We saw an initial blitzing of certain product categories - Pasta, Toilet Rolls, Paracetamol where people went mad and bought stuff they didn't need. After that we saw major shortage across a significant number of categories caused by the major modal shift in how people eat. The lockdown closed pubs and restaurants and workspaces - all the meals that used to be eaten out were now eaten at home. Pack formats became a major issue - there wasn't a shortage in beans but there was a shortage in retail cans and a surplus of huuuuge catering cans.
Retailers were working flat out as were manufacturers trying to respond to wild swings in demand with a supply chain full of holes. Through this longer phase the gaps were not caused by panic buying at all - they were caused by supply chain disruption. We are about to have a major supply chain disruption which will cause not just short term inability to move products / materials but a long term need to try and restructure what comes from where and when.
Manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers - all expecting long term issues and price rises. What do they know about it...
Yes there will be disruption, again no shit Sherlock, I have always said there will be disruption.
The invisible hand will work its magic and we will adjust. Some things may become a bit more expensive, some things may become a bit cheaper and some customers will substitute from more expensive goods to cheaper ones - and life will go on. The wheel of time will turn.
I do not understand how at your claimed age of approx 40 (I think) you have so little understanding of the basics of how the world works. Why not spend just half an hour in a supermarket looking at the little labels on things which tell you their country of origin? Or consider this rather succinct list from wikipedia, and factor in the concept that all crops are seasonal?
"Crops commonly grown in the United Kingdom include cereals, chiefly wheat, oats and barley; root vegetables, chiefly potatoes and sugar beet; pulse crops such as beans or peas; forage crops such as cabbages, vetches, rape and kale; fruit, particularly apples and pears; and hay for animal feed."
I'm thinking back to my grandmother's soup/stew - shank of lamb cooked with chunks of potatoes and swedes and lots of grated carrot. That memory/skill might eb handy ...
Not for the last 5 years plus. Aldi are just another supermarket when it comes to the majority of their products - they have a central buying team, stores are laid out to a "planogram" showing which product where and of how many facings. They do have food special buys but mostly in ambient in the centre aisle.
As for Aldi and the union flags, they are a great champion for British sourcing. But so many of those british made products use imported ingredients / packaging. Many of the shortages we saw earlier this year were because there was a national shortage of plastic film used to form the bag that so many kinds of product come in. Almost all of the raw plastic used by UK packaging producers is imported. As are foil trays for produce and fresh foods. And don't get me started on the supply situation for wooden pallets...
Can I ask a purely practical question? I have been very gradually building up supplies of food for the last 18 months (since Johnson became PM), and I reckon I have enough for 3-4 months. There are just 3 things which I don't have so much of: Milk Bread Root vegetables
I can't see any reason why those should be in short supply, but would be interested in what those more expert then me think?
You can freeze milk and bread - we have a freezer dedicated to just that. And if you have a bread making machine, you can easily make bread from stockpiled flour. You can buy packs of ready-frozen vegetables. Not as good as fresh, admittedly, but a lot better than no veg.
If you have a greenhouse next to the fence you are sitting on, now is a good time to plant onions or beetroot . It is obligatory to play Beethoven to your beetroot.
Long life milk is quite good and keeps for months. Cheese also freezes. As do lightly beaten eggs - surpisingly.
I just planted the microgreens for my Christmas Lunch, so I have the purple glow from my conservatory which may make neighbours think I'm growing cannabis.
If we get No Deal - which is starting to look horrifying possible - then the pressure for Boris to resign will be formidable. It will amount to the greatest political failure in modern British history, making Black Wednesday look like a pasty tax in comparison. There will be absolutely no reason, either for himself or anyone else, for Boris to hang around a moment longer.
Not sure. We have now normalised empty shelves via Covid. Plus no one* will notice the extra administrative burden, to whatever degree it manifests itself, save for a "weren't these Stroopwafels a bit cheaper last week" type of thing. So there is a lot of leeway for absolute total fuck up that Boris can paint as near-normal.
I have been prominent on here saying he will go (I have nine more months of my bet to run) on the basis of logic. It was obvious from the moment that TMay took office that she was manifestly unfit for it and hence was, to quote a noted newspaper editor, a "dead man walking".
Boris is equally unfit to be PM. And he will fall. Just not in 24-hr rolling news time. People who are manifestly unfit for high office generally don't stay as PM for that long. cf J Corbyn.
That said, he does look sticky because all his failings are often waved away as the behaviour of a lovable scallywag.
*no one apart those who are filling out the forms and adhering to the new system, obvs.
Ordinarily he and many of his cabinet colleagues would have been marched out of office by now. Lying and corruption aren't usually politically survivable, yet the bar to serve in a senior role appears to be having been sacked for one or the other previously.
People won't realise how bad this is until it slaps them in the face. Customs checks whether under a deal or WTO will bring the UK supply chain to a crashing halt. When it gets untangled we'll find that we're paying a lot more for less things and every retailer and manufacturer and supplier will be saying why, intercut with the reporters embedded with the 48 hour queues to cross the channel.
"This isn't the Brexit we voted for" - big price rises, mass shortages, mass unemployment. You can't hide the impacts of the end of the free market and free customs, or blame it on the other party, or positively spin it as better than what we had. As reality collapses in on people Johnson will be gone. At speed.
There usually needs to be a catalyst and your final paragraph paints a reasonably possible picture of that catalyst. But as I said we have had empty shelves in very recent memory so I'm not 100% sure he won't have a get out.
There is another factor that means we won't have empty shelves - supermarkets are quite deliberately dynamic. If a produce is unavailable and won't be available for a while they don't generally just put an "out of stock" label on its spot and leave that bit of their shelving empty - they fill the space with something else. They put a different product up instead, or they fill in with other products that would be next to it instead. So the shelves remain "full" (depending upon normal variance of how recently they were restocked) even if products are "unavailable".
If Rochdale wants to say I am wrong then let him say how I am wrong and why.
EG am I wrong and does his supermarket deliberately leave shelves empty when a stock is unavailable for a significant period of time or am I right and the supermarket will change the tickets and put different stock on the shelves instead?
Phil this is what the real world looked like earlier this year.
Thanks to panic buying which stopped in a matter of days because then people had full fridges and freezers. Its a self-correcting problem that can't go on forever.
Exactly. I appreciate it when you agree with something rather than try to argue the opposite. Thanks.
There were empty shelves because of panic buying. That's just the public for you I know what can you do but don't forget a lot of these people also voted for Brexit so we can't make any calls on their intelligence or common sense.
There were empty shelves then and there may very well be empty shelves again.
Yes if people react to no deal with panic buying then there may be some empty shelves for a few days while people panic buy.
Then people's fridges and freezers will be full and they will stop panic buying and the supermarkets will have full shelves again. Just a few days later.
Exactly as happened earlier this year. We didn't go for months with empty shelves, nor will we for months or years to come post-Brexit.
If people start panic buying in the first week of January do you think come the May elections we will still have empty shelves and panic buying going on? Don't be ridiculous! 🤦🏻♂️
You just don't understand the supply chain.
We saw an initial blitzing of certain product categories - Pasta, Toilet Rolls, Paracetamol where people went mad and bought stuff they didn't need. After that we saw major shortage across a significant number of categories caused by the major modal shift in how people eat. The lockdown closed pubs and restaurants and workspaces - all the meals that used to be eaten out were now eaten at home. Pack formats became a major issue - there wasn't a shortage in beans but there was a shortage in retail cans and a surplus of huuuuge catering cans.
Retailers were working flat out as were manufacturers trying to respond to wild swings in demand with a supply chain full of holes. Through this longer phase the gaps were not caused by panic buying at all - they were caused by supply chain disruption. We are about to have a major supply chain disruption which will cause not just short term inability to move products / materials but a long term need to try and restructure what comes from where and when.
Manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers - all expecting long term issues and price rises. What do they know about it...
Yes there will be disruption, again no shit Sherlock, I have always said there will be disruption.
The invisible hand will work its magic and we will adjust. Some things may become a bit more expensive, some things may become a bit cheaper and some customers will substitute from more expensive goods to cheaper ones - and life will go on. The wheel of time will turn.
And the people already on the bottom? They can't substitute the cheapest onion at Tescos for no onion at all.
Perhaps I need to start donating to the local foodbank, given the picture you draw.
It would do more good than complaining. I'm sure someone can use your generosity no matter what.
If we get No Deal - which is starting to look horrifying possible - then the pressure for Boris to resign will be formidable. It will amount to the greatest political failure in modern British history, making Black Wednesday look like a pasty tax in comparison. There will be absolutely no reason, either for himself or anyone else, for Boris to hang around a moment longer.
Not sure. We have now normalised empty shelves via Covid. Plus no one* will notice the extra administrative burden, to whatever degree it manifests itself, save for a "weren't these Stroopwafels a bit cheaper last week" type of thing. So there is a lot of leeway for absolute total fuck up that Boris can paint as near-normal.
I have been prominent on here saying he will go (I have nine more months of my bet to run) on the basis of logic. It was obvious from the moment that TMay took office that she was manifestly unfit for it and hence was, to quote a noted newspaper editor, a "dead man walking".
Boris is equally unfit to be PM. And he will fall. Just not in 24-hr rolling news time. People who are manifestly unfit for high office generally don't stay as PM for that long. cf J Corbyn.
That said, he does look sticky because all his failings are often waved away as the behaviour of a lovable scallywag.
*no one apart those who are filling out the forms and adhering to the new system, obvs.
Ordinarily he and many of his cabinet colleagues would have been marched out of office by now. Lying and corruption aren't usually politically survivable, yet the bar to serve in a senior role appears to be having been sacked for one or the other previously.
People won't realise how bad this is until it slaps them in the face. Customs checks whether under a deal or WTO will bring the UK supply chain to a crashing halt. When it gets untangled we'll find that we're paying a lot more for less things and every retailer and manufacturer and supplier will be saying why, intercut with the reporters embedded with the 48 hour queues to cross the channel.
"This isn't the Brexit we voted for" - big price rises, mass shortages, mass unemployment. You can't hide the impacts of the end of the free market and free customs, or blame it on the other party, or positively spin it as better than what we had. As reality collapses in on people Johnson will be gone. At speed.
There usually needs to be a catalyst and your final paragraph paints a reasonably possible picture of that catalyst. But as I said we have had empty shelves in very recent memory so I'm not 100% sure he won't have a get out.
There is another factor that means we won't have empty shelves - supermarkets are quite deliberately dynamic. If a produce is unavailable and won't be available for a while they don't generally just put an "out of stock" label on its spot and leave that bit of their shelving empty - they fill the space with something else. They put a different product up instead, or they fill in with other products that would be next to it instead. So the shelves remain "full" (depending upon normal variance of how recently they were restocked) even if products are "unavailable".
If Rochdale wants to say I am wrong then let him say how I am wrong and why.
EG am I wrong and does his supermarket deliberately leave shelves empty when a stock is unavailable for a significant period of time or am I right and the supermarket will change the tickets and put different stock on the shelves instead?
Phil this is what the real world looked like earlier this year.
Thanks to panic buying which stopped in a matter of days because then people had full fridges and freezers. Its a self-correcting problem that can't go on forever.
Exactly. I appreciate it when you agree with something rather than try to argue the opposite. Thanks.
There were empty shelves because of panic buying. That's just the public for you I know what can you do but don't forget a lot of these people also voted for Brexit so we can't make any calls on their intelligence or common sense.
There were empty shelves then and there may very well be empty shelves again.
Yes if people react to no deal with panic buying then there may be some empty shelves for a few days while people panic buy.
Then people's fridges and freezers will be full and they will stop panic buying and the supermarkets will have full shelves again. Just a few days later.
Exactly as happened earlier this year. We didn't go for months with empty shelves, nor will we for months or years to come post-Brexit.
If people start panic buying in the first week of January do you think come the May elections we will still have empty shelves and panic buying going on? Don't be ridiculous! 🤦🏻♂️
I have no idea what the actual supply situation was in March. According to the supermarkets, there might not have been an actual problem, but there were those empty shelves nevertheless. Now, it is likely, although I appreciate this is coming from experts so we're slightly in limbo here, that we will have actual supply chain disruption in January.
So previously we (might have) had no actual disruption to supply and panic buying resulted in empty shelves for a matter of weeks. In Jan we might have actual disruption to supply. What do you think might happen then?
I have already said what will happen - product substitution.
The UK has enough products from domestic production and non-EU imports combined to keep shelves full even if all trade with the EU halted overnight. It won't though.
How are the non EU imports going to get into the country? They’ll get held up with everything else.
Then they're fucked. The supermarket sector has already set out that the lack of clarity on paperwork and lack of ability to process paperwork means the mass GB -> NI shipping route will be significantly curtailed with thousands of products pulled according to retailers like Sainsbury's.
Similarly the NI logistics industry has been screaming for months that it is only viable with loads in both directions. Major disruption can sink many of them.
So instead of the usual situation - where UK companies have an Irish subsidiary (Tesco, Aldi etc etc) it'll be the other way round, with RoI chains supplying the north.
There were empty shelves because of panic buying. That's just the public for you I know what can you do but don't forget a lot of these people also voted for Brexit so we can't make any calls on their intelligence or common sense.
There were empty shelves then and there may very well be empty shelves again.
People called 999 when KFC ran short
Food shortages due to Brexit will not be met with stoicism
How many people did? Did 17.4 million people call 999 due to KFC ?
The UK did react to food shortages with stoicism as recently as March. We got through it and life went on.
I don't think you realise how hand to mouth - and how dependent on processed food - a lot of families are because of cash and time pressures. Not being able to get a pizza, for instance, can disrupt plans and routines. That is what is being ignored in the discussion, I think.
given half the UK is being told to stay at home where are the time pressures ? You cant actually go anywhere much except the supermarket.
People have to go to work and children to school. It's common to have a family with the children home and hungry at 5pm, and one adult not till 7, and so on ...
Meals such as pizzas and so on help a lot, but if they cannot be obtained reliably ... it will be interesting to see what happens.
I take it you cant cook.
Knocking up a hot meal is a doddle whatever your budget.
So long as you like risotto.
(The ultimate 50p meal.)
couscous or noodles are the fastest thing youll cook aside from bread and wraps
My favourite quick and cheap meal is an omelette. It is dead easy and if you do it right, a sophisticated dish.
Toast and marmite with scrambled eggs on top. A bit of cheese on top of the toast that melts on impact with the hot egg if you are feeling particularly sophisticated.
The better you cook your eggs the less need for cheese and marmite. Fantastic toast is the key, and some butter on the toast. Then perfectly cooked eggs. A hint of shaved cheese perhaps and the slightest taint of marmite on the buttering knife.
All this celebratory bake off crap and you can't buy a decent loaf of bread!
We need a blokeish bake-off. Bread for cheese and pickle sandwiches, bread for bacon sandwiches, buns for burgers, buns for hotdogs. Bread for pate, and we need to get the good pate's back for this bread.
I can cook faultless boiled eggs, time after time: whites set, yolks runny.
Food of the Gods.
Although 'faultless' seems a boast, and although my boiled eggs are ok - I'm quite envious.
Try this:
Use eggs that have been at room temperature for several hours; NEVER from the fridge.
Use large eggs (for anything smaller the timings will need to be reduced by some indeterminate amount!)
Large pan of water brought to a good boil.
Put 2-4 eggs into that boiling water for four and a half minutes. (More eggs than that and the timings might need slightly extending.) Turn off the heat and let them stand for another 30 seconds. Take them out, take the top off one to eat first and smash the tops of the others, to allow the heat out and stop them cooking.
There were empty shelves because of panic buying. That's just the public for you I know what can you do but don't forget a lot of these people also voted for Brexit so we can't make any calls on their intelligence or common sense.
There were empty shelves then and there may very well be empty shelves again.
People called 999 when KFC ran short
Food shortages due to Brexit will not be met with stoicism
How many people did? Did 17.4 million people call 999 due to KFC ?
The UK did react to food shortages with stoicism as recently as March. We got through it and life went on.
I don't think you realise how hand to mouth - and how dependent on processed food - a lot of families are because of cash and time pressures. Not being able to get a pizza, for instance, can disrupt plans and routines. That is what is being ignored in the discussion, I think.
given half the UK is being told to stay at home where are the time pressures ? You cant actually go anywhere much except the supermarket.
People have to go to work and children to school. It's common to have a family with the children home and hungry at 5pm, and one adult not till 7, and so on ...
Meals such as pizzas and so on help a lot, but if they cannot be obtained reliably ... it will be interesting to see what happens.
I take it you cant cook.
Knocking up a hot meal is a doddle whatever your budget.
So long as you like risotto.
(The ultimate 50p meal.)
Most of our risotto rice comes from Italy.
And where is the protein to come from? It can't all come from rice.
You might just be stretching your argument.
Not so much protein in rice.
That is the point I am making - more protein is needed. Eggs? Cheese? Milk?
Protein from all the lamb beef and fish we are told we wont be able to export anymore
At 50p a meal, as stipulated by an earlier poster?
I'm already doing my best to eat as much local sheep and fish as it is ...
Edit: but not trying to be rude. Your point is a good one, generally.
Kedgeree is what you make using the cheaper fish cuts. It will be a little more than 50p a portion but not by much. I also wasn't aware that the bar was 50p a meal as only one poster mentioned 50p in passing when they commented risotto was the ultimate 50p meal
Not for the last 5 years plus. Aldi are just another supermarket when it comes to the majority of their products - they have a central buying team, stores are laid out to a "planogram" showing which product where and of how many facings. They do have food special buys but mostly in ambient in the centre aisle.
As for Aldi and the union flags, they are a great champion for British sourcing. But so many of those british made products use imported ingredients / packaging. Many of the shortages we saw earlier this year were because there was a national shortage of plastic film used to form the bag that so many kinds of product come in. Almost all of the raw plastic used by UK packaging producers is imported. As are foil trays for produce and fresh foods. And don't get me started on the supply situation for wooden pallets...
Can I ask a purely practical question? I have been very gradually building up supplies of food for the last 18 months (since Johnson became PM), and I reckon I have enough for 3-4 months. There are just 3 things which I don't have so much of: Milk Bread Root vegetables
I can't see any reason why those should be in short supply, but would be interested in what those more expert then me think?
You can freeze milk and bread - we have a freezer dedicated to just that. And if you have a bread making machine, you can easily make bread from stockpiled flour. You can buy packs of ready-frozen vegetables. Not as good as fresh, admittedly, but a lot better than no veg.
If you have a greenhouse next to the fence you are sitting on, now is a good time to plant onions or beetroot . It is obligatory to play Beethoven to your beetroot.
Long life milk is quite good and keeps for months. Cheese also freezes. As do lightly beaten eggs - surpisingly.
I just planted the microgreens for my Christmas Lunch, so I have the purple glow from my conservatory which may make neighbours think I'm growing cannabis.
If we get No Deal - which is starting to look horrifying possible - then the pressure for Boris to resign will be formidable. It will amount to the greatest political failure in modern British history, making Black Wednesday look like a pasty tax in comparison. There will be absolutely no reason, either for himself or anyone else, for Boris to hang around a moment longer.
Not sure. We have now normalised empty shelves via Covid. Plus no one* will notice the extra administrative burden, to whatever degree it manifests itself, save for a "weren't these Stroopwafels a bit cheaper last week" type of thing. So there is a lot of leeway for absolute total fuck up that Boris can paint as near-normal.
I have been prominent on here saying he will go (I have nine more months of my bet to run) on the basis of logic. It was obvious from the moment that TMay took office that she was manifestly unfit for it and hence was, to quote a noted newspaper editor, a "dead man walking".
Boris is equally unfit to be PM. And he will fall. Just not in 24-hr rolling news time. People who are manifestly unfit for high office generally don't stay as PM for that long. cf J Corbyn.
That said, he does look sticky because all his failings are often waved away as the behaviour of a lovable scallywag.
*no one apart those who are filling out the forms and adhering to the new system, obvs.
Ordinarily he and many of his cabinet colleagues would have been marched out of office by now. Lying and corruption aren't usually politically survivable, yet the bar to serve in a senior role appears to be having been sacked for one or the other previously.
People won't realise how bad this is until it slaps them in the face. Customs checks whether under a deal or WTO will bring the UK supply chain to a crashing halt. When it gets untangled we'll find that we're paying a lot more for less things and every retailer and manufacturer and supplier will be saying why, intercut with the reporters embedded with the 48 hour queues to cross the channel.
"This isn't the Brexit we voted for" - big price rises, mass shortages, mass unemployment. You can't hide the impacts of the end of the free market and free customs, or blame it on the other party, or positively spin it as better than what we had. As reality collapses in on people Johnson will be gone. At speed.
There usually needs to be a catalyst and your final paragraph paints a reasonably possible picture of that catalyst. But as I said we have had empty shelves in very recent memory so I'm not 100% sure he won't have a get out.
There is another factor that means we won't have empty shelves - supermarkets are quite deliberately dynamic. If a produce is unavailable and won't be available for a while they don't generally just put an "out of stock" label on its spot and leave that bit of their shelving empty - they fill the space with something else. They put a different product up instead, or they fill in with other products that would be next to it instead. So the shelves remain "full" (depending upon normal variance of how recently they were restocked) even if products are "unavailable".
If Rochdale wants to say I am wrong then let him say how I am wrong and why.
EG am I wrong and does his supermarket deliberately leave shelves empty when a stock is unavailable for a significant period of time or am I right and the supermarket will change the tickets and put different stock on the shelves instead?
Phil this is what the real world looked like earlier this year.
Thanks to panic buying which stopped in a matter of days because then people had full fridges and freezers. Its a self-correcting problem that can't go on forever.
Exactly. I appreciate it when you agree with something rather than try to argue the opposite. Thanks.
There were empty shelves because of panic buying. That's just the public for you I know what can you do but don't forget a lot of these people also voted for Brexit so we can't make any calls on their intelligence or common sense.
There were empty shelves then and there may very well be empty shelves again.
Yes if people react to no deal with panic buying then there may be some empty shelves for a few days while people panic buy.
Then people's fridges and freezers will be full and they will stop panic buying and the supermarkets will have full shelves again. Just a few days later.
Exactly as happened earlier this year. We didn't go for months with empty shelves, nor will we for months or years to come post-Brexit.
If people start panic buying in the first week of January do you think come the May elections we will still have empty shelves and panic buying going on? Don't be ridiculous! 🤦🏻♂️
You just don't understand the supply chain.
We saw an initial blitzing of certain product categories - Pasta, Toilet Rolls, Paracetamol where people went mad and bought stuff they didn't need. After that we saw major shortage across a significant number of categories caused by the major modal shift in how people eat. The lockdown closed pubs and restaurants and workspaces - all the meals that used to be eaten out were now eaten at home. Pack formats became a major issue - there wasn't a shortage in beans but there was a shortage in retail cans and a surplus of huuuuge catering cans.
Retailers were working flat out as were manufacturers trying to respond to wild swings in demand with a supply chain full of holes. Through this longer phase the gaps were not caused by panic buying at all - they were caused by supply chain disruption. We are about to have a major supply chain disruption which will cause not just short term inability to move products / materials but a long term need to try and restructure what comes from where and when.
Manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers - all expecting long term issues and price rises. What do they know about it...
Yes there will be disruption, again no shit Sherlock, I have always said there will be disruption.
The invisible hand will work its magic and we will adjust. Some things may become a bit more expensive, some things may become a bit cheaper and some customers will substitute from more expensive goods to cheaper ones - and life will go on. The wheel of time will turn.
I do not understand how at your claimed age of approx 40 (I think) you have so little understanding of the basics of how the world works. Why not spend just half an hour in a supermarket looking at the little labels on things which tell you their country of origin? Or consider this rather succinct list from wikipedia, and factor in the concept that all crops are seasonal?
"Crops commonly grown in the United Kingdom include cereals, chiefly wheat, oats and barley; root vegetables, chiefly potatoes and sugar beet; pulse crops such as beans or peas; forage crops such as cabbages, vetches, rape and kale; fruit, particularly apples and pears; and hay for animal feed."
I wonder when the age cutoff is. I'm late rather than early 40's and can remember how shlonky the fresh food supply chain was in my childhood. There really was remarkably little that was nice to eat in February, in a way that my children simply wouldn't believe. Now some of the change is down to changing ways of farming in the UK (especially polytunnels), but the main reason we can get a choice of nice things to eat all year round is because we can get more food from abroad where the weather is better. And for fresh food, distance matters.
Not for the last 5 years plus. Aldi are just another supermarket when it comes to the majority of their products - they have a central buying team, stores are laid out to a "planogram" showing which product where and of how many facings. They do have food special buys but mostly in ambient in the centre aisle.
As for Aldi and the union flags, they are a great champion for British sourcing. But so many of those british made products use imported ingredients / packaging. Many of the shortages we saw earlier this year were because there was a national shortage of plastic film used to form the bag that so many kinds of product come in. Almost all of the raw plastic used by UK packaging producers is imported. As are foil trays for produce and fresh foods. And don't get me started on the supply situation for wooden pallets...
Can I ask a purely practical question? I have been very gradually building up supplies of food for the last 18 months (since Johnson became PM), and I reckon I have enough for 3-4 months. There are just 3 things which I don't have so much of: Milk Bread Root vegetables
I can't see any reason why those should be in short supply, but would be interested in what those more expert then me think?
You can freeze milk and bread - we have a freezer dedicated to just that. And if you have a bread making machine, you can easily make bread from stockpiled flour. You can buy packs of ready-frozen vegetables. Not as good as fresh, admittedly, but a lot better than no veg.
If you have a greenhouse next to the fence you are sitting on, now is a good time to plant onions or beetroot . It is obligatory to play Beethoven to your beetroot.
Long life milk is quite good and keeps for months. Cheese also freezes. As do lightly beaten eggs - surpisingly.
I just planted the microgreens for my Christmas Lunch, so I have the purple glow from my conservatory which may make neighbours think I'm growing cannabis.
Is the cannabis in the loft as per normal?
Make sure you have REALLY good insulation betwen the plants and that loft roof - the melting snow on the roof has given the game away too many times....
Not for the last 5 years plus. Aldi are just another supermarket when it comes to the majority of their products - they have a central buying team, stores are laid out to a "planogram" showing which product where and of how many facings. They do have food special buys but mostly in ambient in the centre aisle.
As for Aldi and the union flags, they are a great champion for British sourcing. But so many of those british made products use imported ingredients / packaging. Many of the shortages we saw earlier this year were because there was a national shortage of plastic film used to form the bag that so many kinds of product come in. Almost all of the raw plastic used by UK packaging producers is imported. As are foil trays for produce and fresh foods. And don't get me started on the supply situation for wooden pallets...
Can I ask a purely practical question? I have been very gradually building up supplies of food for the last 18 months (since Johnson became PM), and I reckon I have enough for 3-4 months. There are just 3 things which I don't have so much of: Milk Bread Root vegetables
I can't see any reason why those should be in short supply, but would be interested in what those more expert then me think?
There were shortages of bread flour (for retail purchase as flour, I didn't notice any shortage of bread) in the spring. We mostly make our own bread (bread machine) because it's more convenient to churn it out on demand than either go to the shops every few days or have a lot of freezer space for bread (and also because you can make a lot of fun things). I assume that was due to a spike in demand for bread (stockpiling?) or drop in supply of flour. A fair bit of wheat is imported for flour - 15% [1], largely for bread flour and some other specialised uses, but most bread flour wheat imports are from Canada so should not be affected directly, only perhaps indirectly if there is general chaos at the ports.
TLDR: Bread, possibly, but not that likely. Worst case UK bakers probably mix in a bit more of the less strong flour produced from domestic wheat. Also fairly easy for bakers to stockpile, I'd imagine.
It wasn't flour itself that ran short, it was the retail-size bags for it.
Wider than that. 1. Modal shift in how we eat due to the closedown of hospitality and workplace / school feeding - same number of meal occasions but significant shift in where the food is obtained from 2. Production lines set up to produce large packs for foodservice separate to retail. Lack of additional capacity to make smaller pack formats or rip & tip unwanted large packs into smaller pack sizes 3. Lack of packaging due to a run on materials.
To be clear, I have no idea to what extent there will or won't be food shortages. In general, my belief in Brexit has remained unchanged for four and a half years. There will be value destruction but pretty similar to another 2p on beer and fags. People will be poorer but it won't really be noticeable.
That said, it does appear to me that the risks are on the downside. And if that downside transpires then it might be quite severe. I suppose the government feels lucky.
Oh and this is with a deal. We won't no deal. We will either deal or have an extension.
That's right. Deal happens of course, some disruption for a while, probably involving lorries, but the Dunkirk spirit kicks in, the sun still rises, then we slowly and relentlessly get less wealthy and civilized and influential than we otherwise would have been in a vague unprovable way.
There were empty shelves because of panic buying. That's just the public for you I know what can you do but don't forget a lot of these people also voted for Brexit so we can't make any calls on their intelligence or common sense.
There were empty shelves then and there may very well be empty shelves again.
People called 999 when KFC ran short
Food shortages due to Brexit will not be met with stoicism
How many people did? Did 17.4 million people call 999 due to KFC ?
The UK did react to food shortages with stoicism as recently as March. We got through it and life went on.
I don't think you realise how hand to mouth - and how dependent on processed food - a lot of families are because of cash and time pressures. Not being able to get a pizza, for instance, can disrupt plans and routines. That is what is being ignored in the discussion, I think.
given half the UK is being told to stay at home where are the time pressures ? You cant actually go anywhere much except the supermarket.
People have to go to work and children to school. It's common to have a family with the children home and hungry at 5pm, and one adult not till 7, and so on ...
Meals such as pizzas and so on help a lot, but if they cannot be obtained reliably ... it will be interesting to see what happens.
I take it you cant cook.
Knocking up a hot meal is a doddle whatever your budget.
So long as you like risotto.
(The ultimate 50p meal.)
couscous or noodles are the fastest thing youll cook aside from bread and wraps
My favourite quick and cheap meal is an omelette. It is dead easy and if you do it right, a sophisticated dish.
Toast and marmite with scrambled eggs on top. A bit of cheese on top of the toast that melts on impact with the hot egg if you are feeling particularly sophisticated.
The better you cook your eggs the less need for cheese and marmite. Fantastic toast is the key, and some butter on the toast. Then perfectly cooked eggs. A hint of shaved cheese perhaps and the slightest taint of marmite on the buttering knife.
All this celebratory bake off crap and you can't buy a decent loaf of bread!
We need a blokeish bake-off. Bread for cheese and pickle sandwiches, bread for bacon sandwiches, buns for burgers, buns for hotdogs. Bread for pate, and we need to get the good pate's back for this bread.
I can cook faultless boiled eggs, time after time: whites set, yolks runny.
Food of the Gods.
Although 'faultless' seems a boast, and although my boiled eggs are ok - I'm quite envious.
Try this:
Use eggs that have been at room temperature for several hours; NEVER from the fridge.
Use large eggs (for anything smaller the timings will need to be reduced by some indeterminate amount!)
Large pan of water brought to a good boil.
Put 2-4 eggs into that boiling water for four and a half minutes. (More eggs than that and the timings might need slightly extending.) Turn off the heat and let them stand for another 30 seconds. Take them out, take the top off one to eat first and smash the tops of the others, to allow the heat out and stop them cooking.
Eat with dipping soldiers.
Perhaps its from the fridge thing.
Do you have any insight on scrambled eggs? I'd say they would be my best hand in egg cookery - very slow, lots of butter, stirring madly.
Poached eggs - these are the eggs of god. I intend to keep trying.
Not for the last 5 years plus. Aldi are just another supermarket when it comes to the majority of their products - they have a central buying team, stores are laid out to a "planogram" showing which product where and of how many facings. They do have food special buys but mostly in ambient in the centre aisle.
As for Aldi and the union flags, they are a great champion for British sourcing. But so many of those british made products use imported ingredients / packaging. Many of the shortages we saw earlier this year were because there was a national shortage of plastic film used to form the bag that so many kinds of product come in. Almost all of the raw plastic used by UK packaging producers is imported. As are foil trays for produce and fresh foods. And don't get me started on the supply situation for wooden pallets...
Can I ask a purely practical question? I have been very gradually building up supplies of food for the last 18 months (since Johnson became PM), and I reckon I have enough for 3-4 months. There are just 3 things which I don't have so much of: Milk Bread Root vegetables
I can't see any reason why those should be in short supply, but would be interested in what those more expert then me think?
You can freeze milk and bread - we have a freezer dedicated to just that. And if you have a bread making machine, you can easily make bread from stockpiled flour. You can buy packs of ready-frozen vegetables. Not as good as fresh, admittedly, but a lot better than no veg.
If you have a greenhouse next to the fence you are sitting on, now is a good time to plant onions or beetroot . It is obligatory to play Beethoven to your beetroot.
Long life milk is quite good and keeps for months. Cheese also freezes. As do lightly beaten eggs - surpisingly.
I just planted the microgreens for my Christmas Lunch, so I have the purple glow from my conservatory which may make neighbours think I'm growing cannabis.
Is the cannabis in the loft as per normal?
Make sure you have REALLY good insulation betwen the plants and that loft roof - the melting snow on the roof has given the game away too many times....
I couldn't possibly comment, but it's a warm roof so it couldn't possible go in the roof.
There were empty shelves because of panic buying. That's just the public for you I know what can you do but don't forget a lot of these people also voted for Brexit so we can't make any calls on their intelligence or common sense.
There were empty shelves then and there may very well be empty shelves again.
People called 999 when KFC ran short
Food shortages due to Brexit will not be met with stoicism
How many people did? Did 17.4 million people call 999 due to KFC ?
The UK did react to food shortages with stoicism as recently as March. We got through it and life went on.
I don't think you realise how hand to mouth - and how dependent on processed food - a lot of families are because of cash and time pressures. Not being able to get a pizza, for instance, can disrupt plans and routines. That is what is being ignored in the discussion, I think.
given half the UK is being told to stay at home where are the time pressures ? You cant actually go anywhere much except the supermarket.
People have to go to work and children to school. It's common to have a family with the children home and hungry at 5pm, and one adult not till 7, and so on ...
Meals such as pizzas and so on help a lot, but if they cannot be obtained reliably ... it will be interesting to see what happens.
I take it you cant cook.
Knocking up a hot meal is a doddle whatever your budget.
So long as you like risotto.
(The ultimate 50p meal.)
Most of our risotto rice comes from Italy.
And where is the protein to come from? It can't all come from rice.
You might just be stretching your argument.
Not so much protein in rice.
That is the point I am making - more protein is needed. Eggs? Cheese? Milk?
Protein from all the lamb beef and fish we are told we wont be able to export anymore
At 50p a meal, as stipulated by an earlier poster?
I'm already doing my best to eat as much local sheep and fish as it is ...
Edit: but not trying to be rude. Your point is a good one, generally.
Kedgeree is what you make using the cheaper fish cuts. It will be a little more than 50p a portion but not by much. I also wasn't aware that the bar was 50p a meal as only one poster mentioned 50p in passing when they commented risotto was the ultimate 50p meal
We do have it quite often ( simpler, without most of the spices but with a few frozen prawn s tthrown in if the fish is a bit small). Use the better undyed smoked haddock from the van - though still noty that costly.
There were empty shelves because of panic buying. That's just the public for you I know what can you do but don't forget a lot of these people also voted for Brexit so we can't make any calls on their intelligence or common sense.
There were empty shelves then and there may very well be empty shelves again.
People called 999 when KFC ran short
Food shortages due to Brexit will not be met with stoicism
How many people did? Did 17.4 million people call 999 due to KFC ?
The UK did react to food shortages with stoicism as recently as March. We got through it and life went on.
I don't think you realise how hand to mouth - and how dependent on processed food - a lot of families are because of cash and time pressures. Not being able to get a pizza, for instance, can disrupt plans and routines. That is what is being ignored in the discussion, I think.
given half the UK is being told to stay at home where are the time pressures ? You cant actually go anywhere much except the supermarket.
People have to go to work and children to school. It's common to have a family with the children home and hungry at 5pm, and one adult not till 7, and so on ...
Meals such as pizzas and so on help a lot, but if they cannot be obtained reliably ... it will be interesting to see what happens.
I take it you cant cook.
Knocking up a hot meal is a doddle whatever your budget.
So long as you like risotto.
(The ultimate 50p meal.)
couscous or noodles are the fastest thing youll cook aside from bread and wraps
My favourite quick and cheap meal is an omelette. It is dead easy and if you do it right, a sophisticated dish.
Toast and marmite with scrambled eggs on top. A bit of cheese on top of the toast that melts on impact with the hot egg if you are feeling particularly sophisticated.
The better you cook your eggs the less need for cheese and marmite. Fantastic toast is the key, and some butter on the toast. Then perfectly cooked eggs. A hint of shaved cheese perhaps and the slightest taint of marmite on the buttering knife.
All this celebratory bake off crap and you can't buy a decent loaf of bread!
We need a blokeish bake-off. Bread for cheese and pickle sandwiches, bread for bacon sandwiches, buns for burgers, buns for hotdogs. Bread for pate, and we need to get the good pate's back for this bread.
I can cook faultless boiled eggs, time after time: whites set, yolks runny.
Food of the Gods.
Although 'faultless' seems a boast, and although my boiled eggs are ok - I'm quite envious.
Try this:
Use eggs that have been at room temperature for several hours; NEVER from the fridge.
Use large eggs (for anything smaller the timings will need to be reduced by some indeterminate amount!)
Large pan of water brought to a good boil.
Put 2-4 eggs into that boiling water for four and a half minutes. (More eggs than that and the timings might need slightly extending.) Turn off the heat and let them stand for another 30 seconds. Take them out, take the top off one to eat first and smash the tops of the others, to allow the heat out and stop them cooking.
Eat with dipping soldiers.
Perhaps its from the fridge thing.
Do you have any insight on scrambled eggs? I'd say they would be my best hand in egg cookery - very slow, lots of butter, stirring madly.
Poached eggs - these are the eggs of god. I intend to keep trying.
Scrambled is the wife's forte. Wouldn't dare to tread on her toes there.
Poached eggs - just get a decent poacher. Don't ever try to cook them in a swirl of boiling water. Urgh.
Trade isn't going to halt though. Trade will still happen even if it is disrupted.
But yes for a couple of weeks if we are disrupted it's perfect possible to live off potatoes, root vegetables, peas, beans, cabbages, apples, lamb, seafood etc.
But it won't be necessary. It is panic mongering to suggest it would be. Disruption doesn't mean an end to trade, it never has done.
Trade will stop until they find a way to remove the bottleneck. We know the 12-20 hour queues to cross the EU border with a far smaller volume of trucks at a land border. So suggesting 48 hours plus delays for our sea border is sensible. As you can't tie up the truck fleet in that kind of queue they won't be sent. An eerie calm where the greatly reduced cross border traffic only waits a few hours as opposed to days.
Problem is that if you step up traffic it backs up to a stop again. I know that you disagree with all of this despite the endless evidence that it is facts. Then again you've spent all afternoon telling me about how food supply chains and supermarkets work in a way that would be funny (they'll overface empty chillers with beans FFS) if you weren't so serious.
Not for the last 5 years plus. Aldi are just another supermarket when it comes to the majority of their products - they have a central buying team, stores are laid out to a "planogram" showing which product where and of how many facings. They do have food special buys but mostly in ambient in the centre aisle.
As for Aldi and the union flags, they are a great champion for British sourcing. But so many of those british made products use imported ingredients / packaging. Many of the shortages we saw earlier this year were because there was a national shortage of plastic film used to form the bag that so many kinds of product come in. Almost all of the raw plastic used by UK packaging producers is imported. As are foil trays for produce and fresh foods. And don't get me started on the supply situation for wooden pallets...
Can I ask a purely practical question? I have been very gradually building up supplies of food for the last 18 months (since Johnson became PM), and I reckon I have enough for 3-4 months. There are just 3 things which I don't have so much of: Milk Bread Root vegetables
I can't see any reason why those should be in short supply, but would be interested in what those more expert then me think?
There were shortages of bread flour (for retail purchase as flour, I didn't notice any shortage of bread) in the spring. We mostly make our own bread (bread machine) because it's more convenient to churn it out on demand than either go to the shops every few days or have a lot of freezer space for bread (and also because you can make a lot of fun things). I assume that was due to a spike in demand for bread (stockpiling?) or drop in supply of flour. A fair bit of wheat is imported for flour - 15% [1], largely for bread flour and some other specialised uses, but most bread flour wheat imports are from Canada so should not be affected directly, only perhaps indirectly if there is general chaos at the ports.
TLDR: Bread, possibly, but not that likely. Worst case UK bakers probably mix in a bit more of the less strong flour produced from domestic wheat. Also fairly easy for bakers to stockpile, I'd imagine.
It wasn't flour itself that ran short, it was the retail-size bags for it.
Wider than that. 1. Modal shift in how we eat due to the closedown of hospitality and workplace / school feeding - same number of meal occasions but significant shift in where the food is obtained from 2. Production lines set up to produce large packs for foodservice separate to retail. Lack of additional capacity to make smaller pack formats or rip & tip unwanted large packs into smaller pack sizes 3. Lack of packaging due to a run on materials.
1) Its really only the last 30 years we have eaten like we do now. A lot here will remember seasonal veg cycles. Also a lot of the people who are talking about shortages of imported luxury items are the same people who will in other contexts complain about food miles due to climate change.
3) Packaging used to be paper no reason we can't go back to having our meat wrapped up for us at the meat counter like in my youth and our veggies loose and put in a paper bag. Again also better for the environment aren't we constantly told we use to much plastic?
There were empty shelves because of panic buying. That's just the public for you I know what can you do but don't forget a lot of these people also voted for Brexit so we can't make any calls on their intelligence or common sense.
There were empty shelves then and there may very well be empty shelves again.
People called 999 when KFC ran short
Food shortages due to Brexit will not be met with stoicism
How many people did? Did 17.4 million people call 999 due to KFC ?
The UK did react to food shortages with stoicism as recently as March. We got through it and life went on.
I don't think you realise how hand to mouth - and how dependent on processed food - a lot of families are because of cash and time pressures. Not being able to get a pizza, for instance, can disrupt plans and routines. That is what is being ignored in the discussion, I think.
given half the UK is being told to stay at home where are the time pressures ? You cant actually go anywhere much except the supermarket.
People have to go to work and children to school. It's common to have a family with the children home and hungry at 5pm, and one adult not till 7, and so on ...
Meals such as pizzas and so on help a lot, but if they cannot be obtained reliably ... it will be interesting to see what happens.
I take it you cant cook.
Knocking up a hot meal is a doddle whatever your budget.
So long as you like risotto.
(The ultimate 50p meal.)
Most of our risotto rice comes from Italy.
And where is the protein to come from? It can't all come from rice.
You might just be stretching your argument.
Not so much protein in rice.
That is the point I am making - more protein is needed. Eggs? Cheese? Milk?
Protein from all the lamb beef and fish we are told we wont be able to export anymore
At 50p a meal, as stipulated by an earlier poster?
I'm already doing my best to eat as much local sheep and fish as it is ...
Edit: but not trying to be rude. Your point is a good one, generally.
Kedgeree is what you make using the cheaper fish cuts. It will be a little more than 50p a portion but not by much. I also wasn't aware that the bar was 50p a meal as only one poster mentioned 50p in passing when they commented risotto was the ultimate 50p meal
To be clear, I have no idea to what extent there will or won't be food shortages. In general, my belief in Brexit has remained unchanged for four and a half years. There will be value destruction but pretty similar to another 2p on beer and fags. People will be poorer but it won't really be noticeable.
That said, it does appear to me that the risks are on the downside. And if that downside transpires then it might be quite severe. I suppose the government feels lucky.
Oh and this is with a deal. We won't no deal. We will either deal or have an extension.
That's right. Deal happens of course, some disruption for a while, probably involving lorries, but the Dunkirk spirit kicks in, the sun still rises, then we slowly and relentlessly get less wealthy and civilized and influential than we otherwise would have been in a vague unprovable way.
Correction: Deal [or no deal] happen, some disruption for a while, probably involving lorries, but the Dunkirk spirit kicks in, the sun still rises, then we slowly and relentlessly get less more wealthy and civilized and influential than we otherwise would have been previously were in a vague unprovable provable way.
Trade isn't going to halt though. Trade will still happen even if it is disrupted.
But yes for a couple of weeks if we are disrupted it's perfect possible to live off potatoes, root vegetables, peas, beans, cabbages, apples, lamb, seafood etc.
But it won't be necessary. It is panic mongering to suggest it would be. Disruption doesn't mean an end to trade, it never has done.
Trade will stop until they find a way to remove the bottleneck. We know the 12-20 hour queues to cross the EU border with a far smaller volume of trucks at a land border. So suggesting 48 hours plus delays for our sea border is sensible. As you can't tie up the truck fleet in that kind of queue they won't be sent. An eerie calm where the greatly reduced cross border traffic only waits a few hours as opposed to days.
Problem is that if you step up traffic it backs up to a stop again. I know that you disagree with all of this despite the endless evidence that it is facts. Then again you've spent all afternoon telling me about how food supply chains and supermarkets work in a way that would be funny (they'll overface empty chillers with beans FFS) if you weren't so serious.
I never said they'll overface empty chillers with beans.
Why wouldn't they overface empty chillers with cold produce we have a surplus of?
Be a good opportunity to have a sale on overfaced lamb perhaps?
To be clear, I have no idea to what extent there will or won't be food shortages. In general, my belief in Brexit has remained unchanged for four and a half years. There will be value destruction but pretty similar to another 2p on beer and fags. People will be poorer but it won't really be noticeable.
That said, it does appear to me that the risks are on the downside. And if that downside transpires then it might be quite severe. I suppose the government feels lucky.
Oh and this is with a deal. We won't no deal. We will either deal or have an extension.
That's right. Deal happens of course, some disruption for a while, probably involving lorries, but the Dunkirk spirit kicks in, the sun still rises, then we slowly and relentlessly get less wealthy and civilized and influential than we otherwise would have been in a vague unprovable way.
Correction: Deal [or no deal] happen, some disruption for a while, probably involving lorries, but the Dunkirk spirit kicks in, the sun still rises, then we slowly and relentlessly get less more wealthy and civilized and influential than we otherwise would have been previously were in a vague unprovable provable way.
That's a bit annoying - you doing that and calling it a correction - but I'll let it go.
If we get No Deal - which is starting to look horrifying possible - then the pressure for Boris to resign will be formidable. It will amount to the greatest political failure in modern British history, making Black Wednesday look like a pasty tax in comparison. There will be absolutely no reason, either for himself or anyone else, for Boris to hang around a moment longer.
Not sure. We have now normalised empty shelves via Covid. Plus no one* will notice the extra administrative burden, to whatever degree it manifests itself, save for a "weren't these Stroopwafels a bit cheaper last week" type of thing. So there is a lot of leeway for absolute total fuck up that Boris can paint as near-normal.
I have been prominent on here saying he will go (I have nine more months of my bet to run) on the basis of logic. It was obvious from the moment that TMay took office that she was manifestly unfit for it and hence was, to quote a noted newspaper editor, a "dead man walking".
Boris is equally unfit to be PM. And he will fall. Just not in 24-hr rolling news time. People who are manifestly unfit for high office generally don't stay as PM for that long. cf J Corbyn.
That said, he does look sticky because all his failings are often waved away as the behaviour of a lovable scallywag.
*no one apart those who are filling out the forms and adhering to the new system, obvs.
Ordinarily he and many of his cabinet colleagues would have been marched out of office by now. Lying and corruption aren't usually politically survivable, yet the bar to serve in a senior role appears to be having been sacked for one or the other previously.
People won't realise how bad this is until it slaps them in the face. Customs checks whether under a deal or WTO will bring the UK supply chain to a crashing halt. When it gets untangled we'll find that we're paying a lot more for less things and every retailer and manufacturer and supplier will be saying why, intercut with the reporters embedded with the 48 hour queues to cross the channel.
"This isn't the Brexit we voted for" - big price rises, mass shortages, mass unemployment. You can't hide the impacts of the end of the free market and free customs, or blame it on the other party, or positively spin it as better than what we had. As reality collapses in on people Johnson will be gone. At speed.
There usually needs to be a catalyst and your final paragraph paints a reasonably possible picture of that catalyst. But as I said we have had empty shelves in very recent memory so I'm not 100% sure he won't have a get out.
There is another factor that means we won't have empty shelves - supermarkets are quite deliberately dynamic. If a produce is unavailable and won't be available for a while they don't generally just put an "out of stock" label on its spot and leave that bit of their shelving empty - they fill the space with something else. They put a different product up instead, or they fill in with other products that would be next to it instead. So the shelves remain "full" (depending upon normal variance of how recently they were restocked) even if products are "unavailable".
If Rochdale wants to say I am wrong then let him say how I am wrong and why.
EG am I wrong and does his supermarket deliberately leave shelves empty when a stock is unavailable for a significant period of time or am I right and the supermarket will change the tickets and put different stock on the shelves instead?
Phil this is what the real world looked like earlier this year.
Thanks to panic buying which stopped in a matter of days because then people had full fridges and freezers. Its a self-correcting problem that can't go on forever.
Exactly. I appreciate it when you agree with something rather than try to argue the opposite. Thanks.
There were empty shelves because of panic buying. That's just the public for you I know what can you do but don't forget a lot of these people also voted for Brexit so we can't make any calls on their intelligence or common sense.
There were empty shelves then and there may very well be empty shelves again.
Yes if people react to no deal with panic buying then there may be some empty shelves for a few days while people panic buy.
Then people's fridges and freezers will be full and they will stop panic buying and the supermarkets will have full shelves again. Just a few days later.
Exactly as happened earlier this year. We didn't go for months with empty shelves, nor will we for months or years to come post-Brexit.
If people start panic buying in the first week of January do you think come the May elections we will still have empty shelves and panic buying going on? Don't be ridiculous! 🤦🏻♂️
You just don't understand the supply chain.
We saw an initial blitzing of certain product categories - Pasta, Toilet Rolls, Paracetamol where people went mad and bought stuff they didn't need. After that we saw major shortage across a significant number of categories caused by the major modal shift in how people eat. The lockdown closed pubs and restaurants and workspaces - all the meals that used to be eaten out were now eaten at home. Pack formats became a major issue - there wasn't a shortage in beans but there was a shortage in retail cans and a surplus of huuuuge catering cans.
Retailers were working flat out as were manufacturers trying to respond to wild swings in demand with a supply chain full of holes. Through this longer phase the gaps were not caused by panic buying at all - they were caused by supply chain disruption. We are about to have a major supply chain disruption which will cause not just short term inability to move products / materials but a long term need to try and restructure what comes from where and when.
Manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers - all expecting long term issues and price rises. What do they know about it...
Yes there will be disruption, again no shit Sherlock, I have always said there will be disruption.
The invisible hand will work its magic and we will adjust. Some things may become a bit more expensive, some things may become a bit cheaper and some customers will substitute from more expensive goods to cheaper ones - and life will go on. The wheel of time will turn.
And the people already on the bottom? They can't substitute the cheapest onion at Tescos for no onion at all.
Perhaps I need to start donating to the local foodbank, given the picture you draw.
It's a good thing to do. PS. Cash is best. It enables your local food bank to buy what is short when they are short of it.
Edit. Assuming there is owt available...
To you and others who have chorused in agreement - I have now looked the most likely local candidate up and emailed a few questions (what would they do with the cash? do they do gift aid? can they confirm bank account details*?) to get some sense of the operation.
Cashi s a lot easier for me anyway in this poxy era sans car.
*Another local charity which a family friend runs was hit by someone scanning their emails and slipping in dodgy account details - a three figure donation was diverted.
If we get No Deal - which is starting to look horrifying possible - then the pressure for Boris to resign will be formidable. It will amount to the greatest political failure in modern British history, making Black Wednesday look like a pasty tax in comparison. There will be absolutely no reason, either for himself or anyone else, for Boris to hang around a moment longer.
Not sure. We have now normalised empty shelves via Covid. Plus no one* will notice the extra administrative burden, to whatever degree it manifests itself, save for a "weren't these Stroopwafels a bit cheaper last week" type of thing. So there is a lot of leeway for absolute total fuck up that Boris can paint as near-normal.
I have been prominent on here saying he will go (I have nine more months of my bet to run) on the basis of logic. It was obvious from the moment that TMay took office that she was manifestly unfit for it and hence was, to quote a noted newspaper editor, a "dead man walking".
Boris is equally unfit to be PM. And he will fall. Just not in 24-hr rolling news time. People who are manifestly unfit for high office generally don't stay as PM for that long. cf J Corbyn.
That said, he does look sticky because all his failings are often waved away as the behaviour of a lovable scallywag.
*no one apart those who are filling out the forms and adhering to the new system, obvs.
Ordinarily he and many of his cabinet colleagues would have been marched out of office by now. Lying and corruption aren't usually politically survivable, yet the bar to serve in a senior role appears to be having been sacked for one or the other previously.
People won't realise how bad this is until it slaps them in the face. Customs checks whether under a deal or WTO will bring the UK supply chain to a crashing halt. When it gets untangled we'll find that we're paying a lot more for less things and every retailer and manufacturer and supplier will be saying why, intercut with the reporters embedded with the 48 hour queues to cross the channel.
"This isn't the Brexit we voted for" - big price rises, mass shortages, mass unemployment. You can't hide the impacts of the end of the free market and free customs, or blame it on the other party, or positively spin it as better than what we had. As reality collapses in on people Johnson will be gone. At speed.
There usually needs to be a catalyst and your final paragraph paints a reasonably possible picture of that catalyst. But as I said we have had empty shelves in very recent memory so I'm not 100% sure he won't have a get out.
There is another factor that means we won't have empty shelves - supermarkets are quite deliberately dynamic. If a produce is unavailable and won't be available for a while they don't generally just put an "out of stock" label on its spot and leave that bit of their shelving empty - they fill the space with something else. They put a different product up instead, or they fill in with other products that would be next to it instead. So the shelves remain "full" (depending upon normal variance of how recently they were restocked) even if products are "unavailable".
If Rochdale wants to say I am wrong then let him say how I am wrong and why.
EG am I wrong and does his supermarket deliberately leave shelves empty when a stock is unavailable for a significant period of time or am I right and the supermarket will change the tickets and put different stock on the shelves instead?
Phil this is what the real world looked like earlier this year.
Thanks to panic buying which stopped in a matter of days because then people had full fridges and freezers. Its a self-correcting problem that can't go on forever.
Exactly. I appreciate it when you agree with something rather than try to argue the opposite. Thanks.
There were empty shelves because of panic buying. That's just the public for you I know what can you do but don't forget a lot of these people also voted for Brexit so we can't make any calls on their intelligence or common sense.
There were empty shelves then and there may very well be empty shelves again.
Yes if people react to no deal with panic buying then there may be some empty shelves for a few days while people panic buy.
Then people's fridges and freezers will be full and they will stop panic buying and the supermarkets will have full shelves again. Just a few days later.
Exactly as happened earlier this year. We didn't go for months with empty shelves, nor will we for months or years to come post-Brexit.
If people start panic buying in the first week of January do you think come the May elections we will still have empty shelves and panic buying going on? Don't be ridiculous! 🤦🏻♂️
You just don't understand the supply chain.
We saw an initial blitzing of certain product categories - Pasta, Toilet Rolls, Paracetamol where people went mad and bought stuff they didn't need. After that we saw major shortage across a significant number of categories caused by the major modal shift in how people eat. The lockdown closed pubs and restaurants and workspaces - all the meals that used to be eaten out were now eaten at home. Pack formats became a major issue - there wasn't a shortage in beans but there was a shortage in retail cans and a surplus of huuuuge catering cans.
Retailers were working flat out as were manufacturers trying to respond to wild swings in demand with a supply chain full of holes. Through this longer phase the gaps were not caused by panic buying at all - they were caused by supply chain disruption. We are about to have a major supply chain disruption which will cause not just short term inability to move products / materials but a long term need to try and restructure what comes from where and when.
Manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers - all expecting long term issues and price rises. What do they know about it...
Yes there will be disruption, again no shit Sherlock, I have always said there will be disruption.
The invisible hand will work its magic and we will adjust. Some things may become a bit more expensive, some things may become a bit cheaper and some customers will substitute from more expensive goods to cheaper ones - and life will go on. The wheel of time will turn.
And the people already on the bottom? They can't substitute the cheapest onion at Tescos for no onion at all.
Perhaps I need to start donating to the local foodbank, given the picture you draw.
It's a good thing to do. PS. Cash is best. It enables your local food bank to buy what is short when they are short of it.
Edit. Assuming there is owt available...
To you and others who have chorused in agreement - I have now looked the most likely local candidate up and emailed a few questions (what would they do with the cash? do they do gift aid? can they confirm bank account details*?) to get some sense of the operation.
Cashi s a lot easier for me anyway in this poxy era sans car.
*Another local charity which a family friend runs was hit by someone scanning their emails and slipping in dodgy account details - a three figure donation was diverted.
It is worrying that cases look like they are on the rise again, already.
Depressing but probably inevitable. Small crumb of hope may be the increase in lateral flow tests (at e.g. University) picking up asymptomatics. We may be catching more cases, and track and trace 'may' be getting slightly better. (I read > 70 % last week).
Trade isn't going to halt though. Trade will still happen even if it is disrupted.
But yes for a couple of weeks if we are disrupted it's perfect possible to live off potatoes, root vegetables, peas, beans, cabbages, apples, lamb, seafood etc.
But it won't be necessary. It is panic mongering to suggest it would be. Disruption doesn't mean an end to trade, it never has done.
Trade will stop until they find a way to remove the bottleneck. We know the 12-20 hour queues to cross the EU border with a far smaller volume of trucks at a land border. So suggesting 48 hours plus delays for our sea border is sensible. As you can't tie up the truck fleet in that kind of queue they won't be sent. An eerie calm where the greatly reduced cross border traffic only waits a few hours as opposed to days.
Problem is that if you step up traffic it backs up to a stop again. I know that you disagree with all of this despite the endless evidence that it is facts. Then again you've spent all afternoon telling me about how food supply chains and supermarkets work in a way that would be funny (they'll overface empty chillers with beans FFS) if you weren't so serious.
I really don't know why you bother talking with Philip. I gave up months ago when he started talking rubbish about an area I worked in so understood way more than he did.
On the other hand it's nice to see that a lack of knowledge still doesn't stop Philip "debating" with experts in the field.
I really do wonder what he does for a living given that he manages to post on here all day, every day.
To be clear, I have no idea to what extent there will or won't be food shortages. In general, my belief in Brexit has remained unchanged for four and a half years. There will be value destruction but pretty similar to another 2p on beer and fags. People will be poorer but it won't really be noticeable.
That said, it does appear to me that the risks are on the downside. And if that downside transpires then it might be quite severe. I suppose the government feels lucky.
Oh and this is with a deal. We won't no deal. We will either deal or have an extension.
That's right. Deal happens of course, some disruption for a while, probably involving lorries, but the Dunkirk spirit kicks in, the sun still rises, then we slowly and relentlessly get less wealthy and civilized and influential than we otherwise would have been in a vague unprovable way.
Correction: Deal [or no deal] happen, some disruption for a while, probably involving lorries, but the Dunkirk spirit kicks in, the sun still rises, then we slowly and relentlessly get less more wealthy and civilized and influential than we otherwise would have been previously were in a vague unprovable provable way.
That's a bit annoying - you doing that and calling it a correction - but I'll let it go.
Is that Dunkirk spirit the one that applied when a) KFC ran out of something or other and b) There was a shortage of petrol a few years ago, and there were near riots?
It is worrying that cases look like they are on the rise again, already.
Having been on Northumberland Street last Thursday, I am in no way surprised.
At least vaccination starts tomorrow. With a following wind we can get the most at risk of death/serious illness protected in the next 2-3 months and this will radically transform the situation. Once you slash the hospitalisations/deaths the whole mood changes.
To be clear, I have no idea to what extent there will or won't be food shortages. In general, my belief in Brexit has remained unchanged for four and a half years. There will be value destruction but pretty similar to another 2p on beer and fags. People will be poorer but it won't really be noticeable.
That said, it does appear to me that the risks are on the downside. And if that downside transpires then it might be quite severe. I suppose the government feels lucky.
Oh and this is with a deal. We won't no deal. We will either deal or have an extension.
That's right. Deal happens of course, some disruption for a while, probably involving lorries, but the Dunkirk spirit kicks in, the sun still rises, then we slowly and relentlessly get less wealthy and civilized and influential than we otherwise would have been in a vague unprovable way.
Correction: Deal [or no deal] happen, some disruption for a while, probably involving lorries, but the Dunkirk spirit kicks in, the sun still rises, then we slowly and relentlessly get less more wealthy and civilized and influential than we otherwise would have been previously were in a vague unprovable provable way.
That's a bit annoying - you doing that and calling it a correction - but I'll let it go.
Is that Dunkirk spirit the one that applied when a) KFC ran out of something or other and b) There was a shortage of petrol a few years ago, and there were near riots?
c) What has been seen this year when we got through a pandemic not seen before in any of our lifetimes.
If we get No Deal - which is starting to look horrifying possible - then the pressure for Boris to resign will be formidable. It will amount to the greatest political failure in modern British history, making Black Wednesday look like a pasty tax in comparison. There will be absolutely no reason, either for himself or anyone else, for Boris to hang around a moment longer.
Not sure. We have now normalised empty shelves via Covid. Plus no one* will notice the extra administrative burden, to whatever degree it manifests itself, save for a "weren't these Stroopwafels a bit cheaper last week" type of thing. So there is a lot of leeway for absolute total fuck up that Boris can paint as near-normal.
I have been prominent on here saying he will go (I have nine more months of my bet to run) on the basis of logic. It was obvious from the moment that TMay took office that she was manifestly unfit for it and hence was, to quote a noted newspaper editor, a "dead man walking".
Boris is equally unfit to be PM. And he will fall. Just not in 24-hr rolling news time. People who are manifestly unfit for high office generally don't stay as PM for that long. cf J Corbyn.
That said, he does look sticky because all his failings are often waved away as the behaviour of a lovable scallywag.
*no one apart those who are filling out the forms and adhering to the new system, obvs.
Ordinarily he and many of his cabinet colleagues would have been marched out of office by now. Lying and corruption aren't usually politically survivable, yet the bar to serve in a senior role appears to be having been sacked for one or the other previously.
People won't realise how bad this is until it slaps them in the face. Customs checks whether under a deal or WTO will bring the UK supply chain to a crashing halt. When it gets untangled we'll find that we're paying a lot more for less things and every retailer and manufacturer and supplier will be saying why, intercut with the reporters embedded with the 48 hour queues to cross the channel.
"This isn't the Brexit we voted for" - big price rises, mass shortages, mass unemployment. You can't hide the impacts of the end of the free market and free customs, or blame it on the other party, or positively spin it as better than what we had. As reality collapses in on people Johnson will be gone. At speed.
There usually needs to be a catalyst and your final paragraph paints a reasonably possible picture of that catalyst. But as I said we have had empty shelves in very recent memory so I'm not 100% sure he won't have a get out.
There is another factor that means we won't have empty shelves - supermarkets are quite deliberately dynamic. If a produce is unavailable and won't be available for a while they don't generally just put an "out of stock" label on its spot and leave that bit of their shelving empty - they fill the space with something else. They put a different product up instead, or they fill in with other products that would be next to it instead. So the shelves remain "full" (depending upon normal variance of how recently they were restocked) even if products are "unavailable".
If Rochdale wants to say I am wrong then let him say how I am wrong and why.
EG am I wrong and does his supermarket deliberately leave shelves empty when a stock is unavailable for a significant period of time or am I right and the supermarket will change the tickets and put different stock on the shelves instead?
Phil this is what the real world looked like earlier this year.
Thanks to panic buying which stopped in a matter of days because then people had full fridges and freezers. Its a self-correcting problem that can't go on forever.
Exactly. I appreciate it when you agree with something rather than try to argue the opposite. Thanks.
There were empty shelves because of panic buying. That's just the public for you I know what can you do but don't forget a lot of these people also voted for Brexit so we can't make any calls on their intelligence or common sense.
There were empty shelves then and there may very well be empty shelves again.
Yes if people react to no deal with panic buying then there may be some empty shelves for a few days while people panic buy.
Then people's fridges and freezers will be full and they will stop panic buying and the supermarkets will have full shelves again. Just a few days later.
Exactly as happened earlier this year. We didn't go for months with empty shelves, nor will we for months or years to come post-Brexit.
If people start panic buying in the first week of January do you think come the May elections we will still have empty shelves and panic buying going on? Don't be ridiculous! 🤦🏻♂️
You just don't understand the supply chain.
We saw an initial blitzing of certain product categories - Pasta, Toilet Rolls, Paracetamol where people went mad and bought stuff they didn't need. After that we saw major shortage across a significant number of categories caused by the major modal shift in how people eat. The lockdown closed pubs and restaurants and workspaces - all the meals that used to be eaten out were now eaten at home. Pack formats became a major issue - there wasn't a shortage in beans but there was a shortage in retail cans and a surplus of huuuuge catering cans.
Retailers were working flat out as were manufacturers trying to respond to wild swings in demand with a supply chain full of holes. Through this longer phase the gaps were not caused by panic buying at all - they were caused by supply chain disruption. We are about to have a major supply chain disruption which will cause not just short term inability to move products / materials but a long term need to try and restructure what comes from where and when.
Manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers - all expecting long term issues and price rises. What do they know about it...
Yes there will be disruption, again no shit Sherlock, I have always said there will be disruption.
The invisible hand will work its magic and we will adjust. Some things may become a bit more expensive, some things may become a bit cheaper and some customers will substitute from more expensive goods to cheaper ones - and life will go on. The wheel of time will turn.
And the people already on the bottom? They can't substitute the cheapest onion at Tescos for no onion at all.
Perhaps I need to start donating to the local foodbank, given the picture you draw.
It's a good thing to do. PS. Cash is best. It enables your local food bank to buy what is short when they are short of it.
Edit. Assuming there is owt available...
To you and others who have chorused in agreement - I have now looked the most likely local candidate up and emailed a few questions (what would they do with the cash? do they do gift aid? can they confirm bank account details*?) to get some sense of the operation.
Cashi s a lot easier for me anyway in this poxy era sans car.
*Another local charity which a family friend runs was hit by someone scanning their emails and slipping in dodgy account details - a three figure donation was diverted.
If we get No Deal - which is starting to look horrifying possible - then the pressure for Boris to resign will be formidable. It will amount to the greatest political failure in modern British history, making Black Wednesday look like a pasty tax in comparison. There will be absolutely no reason, either for himself or anyone else, for Boris to hang around a moment longer.
Not sure. We have now normalised empty shelves via Covid. Plus no one* will notice the extra administrative burden, to whatever degree it manifests itself, save for a "weren't these Stroopwafels a bit cheaper last week" type of thing. So there is a lot of leeway for absolute total fuck up that Boris can paint as near-normal.
I have been prominent on here saying he will go (I have nine more months of my bet to run) on the basis of logic. It was obvious from the moment that TMay took office that she was manifestly unfit for it and hence was, to quote a noted newspaper editor, a "dead man walking".
Boris is equally unfit to be PM. And he will fall. Just not in 24-hr rolling news time. People who are manifestly unfit for high office generally don't stay as PM for that long. cf J Corbyn.
That said, he does look sticky because all his failings are often waved away as the behaviour of a lovable scallywag.
*no one apart those who are filling out the forms and adhering to the new system, obvs.
Ordinarily he and many of his cabinet colleagues would have been marched out of office by now. Lying and corruption aren't usually politically survivable, yet the bar to serve in a senior role appears to be having been sacked for one or the other previously.
People won't realise how bad this is until it slaps them in the face. Customs checks whether under a deal or WTO will bring the UK supply chain to a crashing halt. When it gets untangled we'll find that we're paying a lot more for less things and every retailer and manufacturer and supplier will be saying why, intercut with the reporters embedded with the 48 hour queues to cross the channel.
"This isn't the Brexit we voted for" - big price rises, mass shortages, mass unemployment. You can't hide the impacts of the end of the free market and free customs, or blame it on the other party, or positively spin it as better than what we had. As reality collapses in on people Johnson will be gone. At speed.
There usually needs to be a catalyst and your final paragraph paints a reasonably possible picture of that catalyst. But as I said we have had empty shelves in very recent memory so I'm not 100% sure he won't have a get out.
There is another factor that means we won't have empty shelves - supermarkets are quite deliberately dynamic. If a produce is unavailable and won't be available for a while they don't generally just put an "out of stock" label on its spot and leave that bit of their shelving empty - they fill the space with something else. They put a different product up instead, or they fill in with other products that would be next to it instead. So the shelves remain "full" (depending upon normal variance of how recently they were restocked) even if products are "unavailable".
If Rochdale wants to say I am wrong then let him say how I am wrong and why.
EG am I wrong and does his supermarket deliberately leave shelves empty when a stock is unavailable for a significant period of time or am I right and the supermarket will change the tickets and put different stock on the shelves instead?
Phil this is what the real world looked like earlier this year.
Thanks to panic buying which stopped in a matter of days because then people had full fridges and freezers. Its a self-correcting problem that can't go on forever.
Exactly. I appreciate it when you agree with something rather than try to argue the opposite. Thanks.
There were empty shelves because of panic buying. That's just the public for you I know what can you do but don't forget a lot of these people also voted for Brexit so we can't make any calls on their intelligence or common sense.
There were empty shelves then and there may very well be empty shelves again.
Yes if people react to no deal with panic buying then there may be some empty shelves for a few days while people panic buy.
Then people's fridges and freezers will be full and they will stop panic buying and the supermarkets will have full shelves again. Just a few days later.
Exactly as happened earlier this year. We didn't go for months with empty shelves, nor will we for months or years to come post-Brexit.
If people start panic buying in the first week of January do you think come the May elections we will still have empty shelves and panic buying going on? Don't be ridiculous! 🤦🏻♂️
You just don't understand the supply chain.
We saw an initial blitzing of certain product categories - Pasta, Toilet Rolls, Paracetamol where people went mad and bought stuff they didn't need. After that we saw major shortage across a significant number of categories caused by the major modal shift in how people eat. The lockdown closed pubs and restaurants and workspaces - all the meals that used to be eaten out were now eaten at home. Pack formats became a major issue - there wasn't a shortage in beans but there was a shortage in retail cans and a surplus of huuuuge catering cans.
Retailers were working flat out as were manufacturers trying to respond to wild swings in demand with a supply chain full of holes. Through this longer phase the gaps were not caused by panic buying at all - they were caused by supply chain disruption. We are about to have a major supply chain disruption which will cause not just short term inability to move products / materials but a long term need to try and restructure what comes from where and when.
Manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers - all expecting long term issues and price rises. What do they know about it...
Yes there will be disruption, again no shit Sherlock, I have always said there will be disruption.
The invisible hand will work its magic and we will adjust. Some things may become a bit more expensive, some things may become a bit cheaper and some customers will substitute from more expensive goods to cheaper ones - and life will go on. The wheel of time will turn.
And the people already on the bottom? They can't substitute the cheapest onion at Tescos for no onion at all.
Perhaps I need to start donating to the local foodbank, given the picture you draw.
It's a good thing to do. PS. Cash is best. It enables your local food bank to buy what is short when they are short of it.
Edit. Assuming there is owt available...
To you and others who have chorused in agreement - I have now looked the most likely local candidate up and emailed a few questions (what would they do with the cash? do they do gift aid? can they confirm bank account details*?) to get some sense of the operation.
Cashi s a lot easier for me anyway in this poxy era sans car.
*Another local charity which a family friend runs was hit by someone scanning their emails and slipping in dodgy account details - a three figure donation was diverted.
There were empty shelves because of panic buying. That's just the public for you I know what can you do but don't forget a lot of these people also voted for Brexit so we can't make any calls on their intelligence or common sense.
There were empty shelves then and there may very well be empty shelves again.
People called 999 when KFC ran short
Food shortages due to Brexit will not be met with stoicism
How many people did? Did 17.4 million people call 999 due to KFC ?
The UK did react to food shortages with stoicism as recently as March. We got through it and life went on.
I don't think you realise how hand to mouth - and how dependent on processed food - a lot of families are because of cash and time pressures. Not being able to get a pizza, for instance, can disrupt plans and routines. That is what is being ignored in the discussion, I think.
given half the UK is being told to stay at home where are the time pressures ? You cant actually go anywhere much except the supermarket.
People have to go to work and children to school. It's common to have a family with the children home and hungry at 5pm, and one adult not till 7, and so on ...
Meals such as pizzas and so on help a lot, but if they cannot be obtained reliably ... it will be interesting to see what happens.
I take it you cant cook.
Knocking up a hot meal is a doddle whatever your budget.
So long as you like risotto.
(The ultimate 50p meal.)
couscous or noodles are the fastest thing youll cook aside from bread and wraps
My favourite quick and cheap meal is an omelette. It is dead easy and if you do it right, a sophisticated dish.
Toast and marmite with scrambled eggs on top. A bit of cheese on top of the toast that melts on impact with the hot egg if you are feeling particularly sophisticated.
The better you cook your eggs the less need for cheese and marmite. Fantastic toast is the key, and some butter on the toast. Then perfectly cooked eggs. A hint of shaved cheese perhaps and the slightest taint of marmite on the buttering knife.
All this celebratory bake off crap and you can't buy a decent loaf of bread!
We need a blokeish bake-off. Bread for cheese and pickle sandwiches, bread for bacon sandwiches, buns for burgers, buns for hotdogs. Bread for pate, and we need to get the good pate's back for this bread.
I can cook faultless boiled eggs, time after time: whites set, yolks runny.
Food of the Gods.
Although 'faultless' seems a boast, and although my boiled eggs are ok - I'm quite envious.
Try this:
Use eggs that have been at room temperature for several hours; NEVER from the fridge.
Use large eggs (for anything smaller the timings will need to be reduced by some indeterminate amount!)
Large pan of water brought to a good boil.
Put 2-4 eggs into that boiling water for four and a half minutes. (More eggs than that and the timings might need slightly extending.) Turn off the heat and let them stand for another 30 seconds. Take them out, take the top off one to eat first and smash the tops of the others, to allow the heat out and stop them cooking.
Eat with dipping soldiers.
Perhaps its from the fridge thing.
Do you have any insight on scrambled eggs? I'd say they would be my best hand in egg cookery - very slow, lots of butter, stirring madly.
Poached eggs - these are the eggs of god. I intend to keep trying.
Scrambled is the wife's forte. Wouldn't dare to tread on her toes there.
Poached eggs - just get a decent poacher. Don't ever try to cook them in a swirl of boiling water. Urgh.
You should investigate ' scrambled' yourself - buy loads of butter. Not omletting it is the key. It's a mans sort of egg dish anyway - best served very early to a sleepy girlfriend. You can even bugger up the toast if the scrambled eggs are right.
Poached - trust me this is the true way of the egg!
I'm far from good at poached eggs, but boiling water is too hot, and I'm not sure that swirling (or vinegar) helps. (edit: if I could get this right i'd be very happy)
Tomorrow morning I'm going to follow your plan with some eggs that are out of the fridge overnight.
To be clear, I have no idea to what extent there will or won't be food shortages. In general, my belief in Brexit has remained unchanged for four and a half years. There will be value destruction but pretty similar to another 2p on beer and fags. People will be poorer but it won't really be noticeable.
That said, it does appear to me that the risks are on the downside. And if that downside transpires then it might be quite severe. I suppose the government feels lucky.
Oh and this is with a deal. We won't no deal. We will either deal or have an extension.
That's right. Deal happens of course, some disruption for a while, probably involving lorries, but the Dunkirk spirit kicks in, the sun still rises, then we slowly and relentlessly get less wealthy and civilized and influential than we otherwise would have been in a vague unprovable way.
Correction: Deal [or no deal] happen, some disruption for a while, probably involving lorries, but the Dunkirk spirit kicks in, the sun still rises, then we slowly and relentlessly get less more wealthy and civilized and influential than we otherwise would have been previously were in a vague unprovable provable way.
That's a bit annoying - you doing that and calling it a correction - but I'll let it go.
Is that Dunkirk spirit the one that applied when a) KFC ran out of something or other and b) There was a shortage of petrol a few years ago, and there were near riots?
And before anyone says "but Covid!" consider:
Covid was a natural disaster, the like of which few of us have experienced in our lives. At least to start with, people cut the government a lot of slack. (Not all of it deserved. The faffing around in mid March has cost this country a huge amount in both lives and treasure.) Despite that, people started getting impatient after a few months.
Brexit, especially this form of Brexit, is a political decision, actively sought by the current government team...
Trade isn't going to halt though. Trade will still happen even if it is disrupted.
But yes for a couple of weeks if we are disrupted it's perfect possible to live off potatoes, root vegetables, peas, beans, cabbages, apples, lamb, seafood etc.
But it won't be necessary. It is panic mongering to suggest it would be. Disruption doesn't mean an end to trade, it never has done.
Trade will stop until they find a way to remove the bottleneck. We know the 12-20 hour queues to cross the EU border with a far smaller volume of trucks at a land border. So suggesting 48 hours plus delays for our sea border is sensible. As you can't tie up the truck fleet in that kind of queue they won't be sent. An eerie calm where the greatly reduced cross border traffic only waits a few hours as opposed to days.
Problem is that if you step up traffic it backs up to a stop again. I know that you disagree with all of this despite the endless evidence that it is facts. Then again you've spent all afternoon telling me about how food supply chains and supermarkets work in a way that would be funny (they'll overface empty chillers with beans FFS) if you weren't so serious.
I really don't know why you bother talking with Philip. I gave up months ago when he started talking rubbish about an area I worked in so understood way more than he did.
On the other hand it's nice to see that a lack of knowledge still doesn't stop Philip "debating" with experts in the field.
I really do wonder what he does for a living given that he manages to post on here all day, every day.
ON the other other hand, RP's comments in particular have been hugely illuminating, so I am not complaining!
Big thank you to everybody for the answers re milk, bread and root vegetables.
Milk: Yes I have some frozen but it takes up a lot of room and I can't fit any more. I don't like the taste of long life milk but given Rochdale's concern about packaging I will stock up on some.
Bread: Yes I noticed that as Selebian says bread was still available even when flour was very hard to get hold of. Didn't know our main flour imports were from Canada, thanks for that. I have some stock of bread flour, think I will get some more just in case.
Root veg: No greenhouse (or green fingers ;-) ) unfortunately - I have been thinking I could grown my own onions, carrots, potatoes if I had any idea about gardening. But I know local farmers round here do root veg boxes.
I don't like beetroot (whether Beethoven-reared or otherwise) - sorry MattW! But thanks for the tip about freezing eggs - they won't take up much room in that form, either.
I'm hoping most of this won't be necessary - but prefer to "Be Prepared". Nothing will be wasted anyway. At some point in the future I am going to have some very small food bills as all this gets unwound!
Not for the last 5 years plus. Aldi are just another supermarket when it comes to the majority of their products - they have a central buying team, stores are laid out to a "planogram" showing which product where and of how many facings. They do have food special buys but mostly in ambient in the centre aisle.
As for Aldi and the union flags, they are a great champion for British sourcing. But so many of those british made products use imported ingredients / packaging. Many of the shortages we saw earlier this year were because there was a national shortage of plastic film used to form the bag that so many kinds of product come in. Almost all of the raw plastic used by UK packaging producers is imported. As are foil trays for produce and fresh foods. And don't get me started on the supply situation for wooden pallets...
Can I ask a purely practical question? I have been very gradually building up supplies of food for the last 18 months (since Johnson became PM), and I reckon I have enough for 3-4 months. There are just 3 things which I don't have so much of: Milk Bread Root vegetables
I can't see any reason why those should be in short supply, but would be interested in what those more expert then me think?
There were shortages of bread flour (for retail purchase as flour, I didn't notice any shortage of bread) in the spring. We mostly make our own bread (bread machine) because it's more convenient to churn it out on demand than either go to the shops every few days or have a lot of freezer space for bread (and also because you can make a lot of fun things). I assume that was due to a spike in demand for bread (stockpiling?) or drop in supply of flour. A fair bit of wheat is imported for flour - 15% [1], largely for bread flour and some other specialised uses, but most bread flour wheat imports are from Canada so should not be affected directly, only perhaps indirectly if there is general chaos at the ports.
TLDR: Bread, possibly, but not that likely. Worst case UK bakers probably mix in a bit more of the less strong flour produced from domestic wheat. Also fairly easy for bakers to stockpile, I'd imagine.
It wasn't flour itself that ran short, it was the retail-size bags for it.
Wider than that. 1. Modal shift in how we eat due to the closedown of hospitality and workplace / school feeding - same number of meal occasions but significant shift in where the food is obtained from 2. Production lines set up to produce large packs for foodservice separate to retail. Lack of additional capacity to make smaller pack formats or rip & tip unwanted large packs into smaller pack sizes 3. Lack of packaging due to a run on materials.
1) Its really only the last 30 years we have eaten like we do now. A lot here will remember seasonal veg cycles. Also a lot of the people who are talking about shortages of imported luxury items are the same people who will in other contexts complain about food miles due to climate change.
3) Packaging used to be paper no reason we can't go back to having our meat wrapped up for us at the meat counter like in my youth and our veggies loose and put in a paper bag. Again also better for the environment aren't we constantly told we use to much plastic?
Sure - we can tell people that thanks to Brexit there will be a marked and enforced change in their diets. Bound to be popular - a patriotic campaign for Herring and Chips to replace the hard to get and ludicrously priced Haddock imports.
And packaging? There is a definite push towards loose produce again albeit on a small scale - or there was until the pox got people afeared of touching stuff that other people have touched. Harder to do meat and fish as self service like veg - the supermarkets are largely removing expensive to run counters for pre-packed. They could be brought back but at a decent oncost that consumers will have to pay.
Trade isn't going to halt though. Trade will still happen even if it is disrupted.
But yes for a couple of weeks if we are disrupted it's perfect possible to live off potatoes, root vegetables, peas, beans, cabbages, apples, lamb, seafood etc.
But it won't be necessary. It is panic mongering to suggest it would be. Disruption doesn't mean an end to trade, it never has done.
Trade will stop until they find a way to remove the bottleneck. We know the 12-20 hour queues to cross the EU border with a far smaller volume of trucks at a land border. So suggesting 48 hours plus delays for our sea border is sensible. As you can't tie up the truck fleet in that kind of queue they won't be sent. An eerie calm where the greatly reduced cross border traffic only waits a few hours as opposed to days.
Problem is that if you step up traffic it backs up to a stop again. I know that you disagree with all of this despite the endless evidence that it is facts. Then again you've spent all afternoon telling me about how food supply chains and supermarkets work in a way that would be funny (they'll overface empty chillers with beans FFS) if you weren't so serious.
I never said they'll overface empty chillers with beans.
Why wouldn't they overface empty chillers with cold produce we have a surplus of?
Be a good opportunity to have a sale on overfaced lamb perhaps?
Jesus. Like I said, have no idea about how supply chain works.
To be clear, I have no idea to what extent there will or won't be food shortages. In general, my belief in Brexit has remained unchanged for four and a half years. There will be value destruction but pretty similar to another 2p on beer and fags. People will be poorer but it won't really be noticeable.
That said, it does appear to me that the risks are on the downside. And if that downside transpires then it might be quite severe. I suppose the government feels lucky.
Oh and this is with a deal. We won't no deal. We will either deal or have an extension.
That's right. Deal happens of course, some disruption for a while, probably involving lorries, but the Dunkirk spirit kicks in, the sun still rises, then we slowly and relentlessly get less wealthy and civilized and influential than we otherwise would have been in a vague unprovable way.
Correction: Deal [or no deal] happen, some disruption for a while, probably involving lorries, but the Dunkirk spirit kicks in, the sun still rises, then we slowly and relentlessly get less more wealthy and civilized and influential than we otherwise would have been previously were in a vague unprovable provable way.
That's a bit annoying - you doing that and calling it a correction - but I'll let it go.
Is that Dunkirk spirit the one that applied when a) KFC ran out of something or other and b) There was a shortage of petrol a few years ago, and there were near riots?
And before anyone says "but Covid!" consider:
Covid was a natural disaster, the like of which few of us have experienced in our lives. At least to start with, people cut the government a lot of slack. (Not all of it deserved. The faffing around in mid March has cost this country a huge amount in both lives and treasure.) Despite that, people started getting impatient after a few months.
Brexit, especially this form of Brexit, is a political decision, actively sought by the current government team...
And in a world or at least country where government policy has been to make food ever cheaper and more abundant (or at least not get in the way too much of that process).
What happened to Mr Johnson's much trumpeted obesity campaign post his brush with Covid BTW? I don't live in Scotland, whicvh may explain why I never saw a cheep more about it.
There were empty shelves because of panic buying. That's just the public for you I know what can you do but don't forget a lot of these people also voted for Brexit so we can't make any calls on their intelligence or common sense.
There were empty shelves then and there may very well be empty shelves again.
People called 999 when KFC ran short
Food shortages due to Brexit will not be met with stoicism
How many people did? Did 17.4 million people call 999 due to KFC ?
The UK did react to food shortages with stoicism as recently as March. We got through it and life went on.
I don't think you realise how hand to mouth - and how dependent on processed food - a lot of families are because of cash and time pressures. Not being able to get a pizza, for instance, can disrupt plans and routines. That is what is being ignored in the discussion, I think.
given half the UK is being told to stay at home where are the time pressures ? You cant actually go anywhere much except the supermarket.
People have to go to work and children to school. It's common to have a family with the children home and hungry at 5pm, and one adult not till 7, and so on ...
Meals such as pizzas and so on help a lot, but if they cannot be obtained reliably ... it will be interesting to see what happens.
I take it you cant cook.
Knocking up a hot meal is a doddle whatever your budget.
So long as you like risotto.
(The ultimate 50p meal.)
couscous or noodles are the fastest thing youll cook aside from bread and wraps
My favourite quick and cheap meal is an omelette. It is dead easy and if you do it right, a sophisticated dish.
Toast and marmite with scrambled eggs on top. A bit of cheese on top of the toast that melts on impact with the hot egg if you are feeling particularly sophisticated.
The better you cook your eggs the less need for cheese and marmite. Fantastic toast is the key, and some butter on the toast. Then perfectly cooked eggs. A hint of shaved cheese perhaps and the slightest taint of marmite on the buttering knife.
All this celebratory bake off crap and you can't buy a decent loaf of bread!
We need a blokeish bake-off. Bread for cheese and pickle sandwiches, bread for bacon sandwiches, buns for burgers, buns for hotdogs. Bread for pate, and we need to get the good pate's back for this bread.
I can cook faultless boiled eggs, time after time: whites set, yolks runny.
Food of the Gods.
Although 'faultless' seems a boast, and although my boiled eggs are ok - I'm quite envious.
Try this:
Use eggs that have been at room temperature for several hours; NEVER from the fridge.
Use large eggs (for anything smaller the timings will need to be reduced by some indeterminate amount!)
Large pan of water brought to a good boil.
Put 2-4 eggs into that boiling water for four and a half minutes. (More eggs than that and the timings might need slightly extending.) Turn off the heat and let them stand for another 30 seconds. Take them out, take the top off one to eat first and smash the tops of the others, to allow the heat out and stop them cooking.
Eat with dipping soldiers.
Perhaps its from the fridge thing.
Do you have any insight on scrambled eggs? I'd say they would be my best hand in egg cookery - very slow, lots of butter, stirring madly.
Poached eggs - these are the eggs of god. I intend to keep trying.
Scrambled is the wife's forte. Wouldn't dare to tread on her toes there.
Poached eggs - just get a decent poacher. Don't ever try to cook them in a swirl of boiling water. Urgh.
You should investigate ' scrambled' yourself - buy loads of butter. Not omletting it is the key. It's a mans sort of egg dish anyway - best served very early to a sleepy girlfriend. You can even bugger up the toast if the scrambled eggs are right.
Poached - trust me this is the true way of the egg!
I'm far from good at poached eggs, but boiling water is too hot, and I'm not sure that swirling (or vinegar) helps. (edit: if I could get this right i'd be very happy)
Tomorrow morning I'm going to follow your plan with some eggs that are out of the fridge overnight.
Pro tip for poached eggs: your water should be only just wobbling on the surface, def. not boiling. Lower your unbroken eggs into it for 30 seconds, then hoick them out again and break them into the water as usual. This boils the outer layer of white so they hold together better.
Not for the last 5 years plus. Aldi are just another supermarket when it comes to the majority of their products - they have a central buying team, stores are laid out to a "planogram" showing which product where and of how many facings. They do have food special buys but mostly in ambient in the centre aisle.
As for Aldi and the union flags, they are a great champion for British sourcing. But so many of those british made products use imported ingredients / packaging. Many of the shortages we saw earlier this year were because there was a national shortage of plastic film used to form the bag that so many kinds of product come in. Almost all of the raw plastic used by UK packaging producers is imported. As are foil trays for produce and fresh foods. And don't get me started on the supply situation for wooden pallets...
Can I ask a purely practical question? I have been very gradually building up supplies of food for the last 18 months (since Johnson became PM), and I reckon I have enough for 3-4 months. There are just 3 things which I don't have so much of: Milk Bread Root vegetables
I can't see any reason why those should be in short supply, but would be interested in what those more expert then me think?
There were shortages of bread flour (for retail purchase as flour, I didn't notice any shortage of bread) in the spring. We mostly make our own bread (bread machine) because it's more convenient to churn it out on demand than either go to the shops every few days or have a lot of freezer space for bread (and also because you can make a lot of fun things). I assume that was due to a spike in demand for bread (stockpiling?) or drop in supply of flour. A fair bit of wheat is imported for flour - 15% [1], largely for bread flour and some other specialised uses, but most bread flour wheat imports are from Canada so should not be affected directly, only perhaps indirectly if there is general chaos at the ports.
TLDR: Bread, possibly, but not that likely. Worst case UK bakers probably mix in a bit more of the less strong flour produced from domestic wheat. Also fairly easy for bakers to stockpile, I'd imagine.
It wasn't flour itself that ran short, it was the retail-size bags for it.
Wider than that. 1. Modal shift in how we eat due to the closedown of hospitality and workplace / school feeding - same number of meal occasions but significant shift in where the food is obtained from 2. Production lines set up to produce large packs for foodservice separate to retail. Lack of additional capacity to make smaller pack formats or rip & tip unwanted large packs into smaller pack sizes 3. Lack of packaging due to a run on materials.
1) Its really only the last 30 years we have eaten like we do now. A lot here will remember seasonal veg cycles. Also a lot of the people who are talking about shortages of imported luxury items are the same people who will in other contexts complain about food miles due to climate change.
3) Packaging used to be paper no reason we can't go back to having our meat wrapped up for us at the meat counter like in my youth and our veggies loose and put in a paper bag. Again also better for the environment aren't we constantly told we use to much plastic?
Sure - we can tell people that thanks to Brexit there will be a marked and enforced change in their diets. Bound to be popular - a patriotic campaign for Herring and Chips to replace the hard to get and ludicrously priced Haddock imports.
And packaging? There is a definite push towards loose produce again albeit on a small scale - or there was until the pox got people afeared of touching stuff that other people have touched. Harder to do meat and fish as self service like veg - the supermarkets are largely removing expensive to run counters for pre-packed. They could be brought back but at a decent oncost that consumers will have to pay.
By "full hybrids" what do they mean? Toyota sell a lot of "self-charging" hybrids that do the same MPG as small turbo petrol cars do. Why is it ok to sell one 60mpg car and not another?
I'm far from good at poached eggs, but boiling water is too hot, and I'm not sure that swirling (or vinegar) helps. (edit: if I could get this right i'd be very happy)
The trick is a non-stick pan
Heat the water until bubbles start rising from the bottom, but it's not a rolling boil
Drop the egg in. No vinegar. No vortex.
When is separates from the base of the pan it's cooked.
Do you have any insight on scrambled eggs? I'd say they would be my best hand in egg cookery - very slow, lots of butter, stirring madly.
Poached eggs - these are the eggs of god. I intend to keep trying.
I find scrambled eggs on toast taste best with almost an equal amount of milk added (say 200ml of milk for 250 ml of egg mix). But that may just be my taste buds. (If not on toast use a bit less milk - but on toast is best!)
Big thank you to everybody for the answers re milk, bread and root vegetables.
Milk: Yes I have some frozen but it takes up a lot of room and I can't fit any more. I don't like the taste of long life milk but given Rochdale's concern about packaging I will stock up on some.
Bread: Yes I noticed that as Selebian says bread was still available even when flour was very hard to get hold of. Didn't know our main flour imports were from Canada, thanks for that. I have some stock of bread flour, think I will get some more just in case.
Root veg: No greenhouse (or green fingers ;-) ) unfortunately - I have been thinking I could grown my own onions, carrots, potatoes if I had any idea about gardening. But I know local farmers round here do root veg boxes.
I don't like beetroot (whether Beethoven-reared or otherwise) - sorry MattW! But thanks for the tip about freezing eggs - they won't take up much room in that form, either.
I'm hoping most of this won't be necessary - but prefer to "Be Prepared". Nothing will be wasted anyway. At some point in the future I am going to have some very small food bills as all this gets unwound!
Ah yes, wheat imports from Canada. Ever been involved in that? Lets assume your producer in somewhere like Regina has got capacity they can sell you. It gets packaged up into 25kg / 50kg sacks and loaded into containers. Then a transcontinental rail journey. Then onto a boat for a sail across the Atlantic. Then unloaded and shipped to you from the port.
By the time you allow for shipping delays (land / weather disruption at sea) you have to contract a long way out to ensure the stuff arrives on time for your production plan. There is minimal flexibility - you commit and it arrives when it arrives.
It is worrying that cases look like they are on the rise again, already.
Evidence? I hope you aren't just looking at the daily total, as you know that Wales is up nearly 4x from same day last week, and that itself is down to a couple of areas that have exploded.
Ministers will need to watch what they eat in the event of a Brexit-driven food shortage. If we're all forced to eat Smash and tripe, then the first picture of someone from the government scoffing caviar in a posh restaurant could be politically lethal.
Trade isn't going to halt though. Trade will still happen even if it is disrupted.
But yes for a couple of weeks if we are disrupted it's perfect possible to live off potatoes, root vegetables, peas, beans, cabbages, apples, lamb, seafood etc.
But it won't be necessary. It is panic mongering to suggest it would be. Disruption doesn't mean an end to trade, it never has done.
Trade will stop until they find a way to remove the bottleneck. We know the 12-20 hour queues to cross the EU border with a far smaller volume of trucks at a land border. So suggesting 48 hours plus delays for our sea border is sensible. As you can't tie up the truck fleet in that kind of queue they won't be sent. An eerie calm where the greatly reduced cross border traffic only waits a few hours as opposed to days.
Problem is that if you step up traffic it backs up to a stop again. I know that you disagree with all of this despite the endless evidence that it is facts. Then again you've spent all afternoon telling me about how food supply chains and supermarkets work in a way that would be funny (they'll overface empty chillers with beans FFS) if you weren't so serious.
I never said they'll overface empty chillers with beans.
Why wouldn't they overface empty chillers with cold produce we have a surplus of?
Be a good opportunity to have a sale on overfaced lamb perhaps?
Jesus. Like I said, have no idea about how supply chain works.
The lamb that gets exported to the EU - if there is a disruption to international trade then why can't that be sold in the UK?
If there's something I'm missing then why not educate me? My local Morrisons wraps up its meat on-site with the in-store butcher, I appreciate not every supermarket does that but why can't lamb if we have a surplus of it be shipped to the supermarkets and sold there?
Anyway, give me 5 minutes. Let me go back to the latest negotiation round of this food manufacturing partnership agreement I am negotiating. Not that I know anything about food manufacturing or negotiating as apparently I'm so wrong and Phillip with wot he knows is so right.
There were empty shelves because of panic buying. That's just the public for you I know what can you do but don't forget a lot of these people also voted for Brexit so we can't make any calls on their intelligence or common sense.
There were empty shelves then and there may very well be empty shelves again.
People called 999 when KFC ran short
Food shortages due to Brexit will not be met with stoicism
How many people did? Did 17.4 million people call 999 due to KFC ?
The UK did react to food shortages with stoicism as recently as March. We got through it and life went on.
I don't think you realise how hand to mouth - and how dependent on processed food - a lot of families are because of cash and time pressures. Not being able to get a pizza, for instance, can disrupt plans and routines. That is what is being ignored in the discussion, I think.
given half the UK is being told to stay at home where are the time pressures ? You cant actually go anywhere much except the supermarket.
People have to go to work and children to school. It's common to have a family with the children home and hungry at 5pm, and one adult not till 7, and so on ...
Meals such as pizzas and so on help a lot, but if they cannot be obtained reliably ... it will be interesting to see what happens.
I take it you cant cook.
Knocking up a hot meal is a doddle whatever your budget.
So long as you like risotto.
(The ultimate 50p meal.)
couscous or noodles are the fastest thing youll cook aside from bread and wraps
My favourite quick and cheap meal is an omelette. It is dead easy and if you do it right, a sophisticated dish.
Toast and marmite with scrambled eggs on top. A bit of cheese on top of the toast that melts on impact with the hot egg if you are feeling particularly sophisticated.
The better you cook your eggs the less need for cheese and marmite. Fantastic toast is the key, and some butter on the toast. Then perfectly cooked eggs. A hint of shaved cheese perhaps and the slightest taint of marmite on the buttering knife.
All this celebratory bake off crap and you can't buy a decent loaf of bread!
We need a blokeish bake-off. Bread for cheese and pickle sandwiches, bread for bacon sandwiches, buns for burgers, buns for hotdogs. Bread for pate, and we need to get the good pate's back for this bread.
I can cook faultless boiled eggs, time after time: whites set, yolks runny.
Food of the Gods.
Although 'faultless' seems a boast, and although my boiled eggs are ok - I'm quite envious.
Try this:
Use eggs that have been at room temperature for several hours; NEVER from the fridge.
Use large eggs (for anything smaller the timings will need to be reduced by some indeterminate amount!)
Large pan of water brought to a good boil.
Put 2-4 eggs into that boiling water for four and a half minutes. (More eggs than that and the timings might need slightly extending.) Turn off the heat and let them stand for another 30 seconds. Take them out, take the top off one to eat first and smash the tops of the others, to allow the heat out and stop them cooking.
Eat with dipping soldiers.
Perhaps its from the fridge thing.
Do you have any insight on scrambled eggs? I'd say they would be my best hand in egg cookery - very slow, lots of butter, stirring madly.
Poached eggs - these are the eggs of god. I intend to keep trying.
Scrambled is the wife's forte. Wouldn't dare to tread on her toes there.
Poached eggs - just get a decent poacher. Don't ever try to cook them in a swirl of boiling water. Urgh.
You should investigate ' scrambled' yourself - buy loads of butter. Not omletting it is the key. It's a mans sort of egg dish anyway - best served very early to a sleepy girlfriend. You can even bugger up the toast if the scrambled eggs are right.
Poached - trust me this is the true way of the egg!
I'm far from good at poached eggs, but boiling water is too hot, and I'm not sure that swirling (or vinegar) helps. (edit: if I could get this right i'd be very happy)
Tomorrow morning I'm going to follow your plan with some eggs that are out of the fridge overnight.
Pro tip for poached eggs: your water should be only just wobbling on the surface, def. not boiling. Lower your unbroken eggs into it for 30 seconds, then hoick them out again and break them into the water as usual. This boils the outer layer of white so they hold together better.
I'll try it. On the face of it it seems a magnificent plan!
There were empty shelves because of panic buying. That's just the public for you I know what can you do but don't forget a lot of these people also voted for Brexit so we can't make any calls on their intelligence or common sense.
There were empty shelves then and there may very well be empty shelves again.
People called 999 when KFC ran short
Food shortages due to Brexit will not be met with stoicism
How many people did? Did 17.4 million people call 999 due to KFC ?
The UK did react to food shortages with stoicism as recently as March. We got through it and life went on.
I don't think you realise how hand to mouth - and how dependent on processed food - a lot of families are because of cash and time pressures. Not being able to get a pizza, for instance, can disrupt plans and routines. That is what is being ignored in the discussion, I think.
given half the UK is being told to stay at home where are the time pressures ? You cant actually go anywhere much except the supermarket.
People have to go to work and children to school. It's common to have a family with the children home and hungry at 5pm, and one adult not till 7, and so on ...
Meals such as pizzas and so on help a lot, but if they cannot be obtained reliably ... it will be interesting to see what happens.
I take it you cant cook.
Knocking up a hot meal is a doddle whatever your budget.
So long as you like risotto.
(The ultimate 50p meal.)
couscous or noodles are the fastest thing youll cook aside from bread and wraps
My favourite quick and cheap meal is an omelette. It is dead easy and if you do it right, a sophisticated dish.
Toast and marmite with scrambled eggs on top. A bit of cheese on top of the toast that melts on impact with the hot egg if you are feeling particularly sophisticated.
The better you cook your eggs the less need for cheese and marmite. Fantastic toast is the key, and some butter on the toast. Then perfectly cooked eggs. A hint of shaved cheese perhaps and the slightest taint of marmite on the buttering knife.
All this celebratory bake off crap and you can't buy a decent loaf of bread!
We need a blokeish bake-off. Bread for cheese and pickle sandwiches, bread for bacon sandwiches, buns for burgers, buns for hotdogs. Bread for pate, and we need to get the good pate's back for this bread.
I can cook faultless boiled eggs, time after time: whites set, yolks runny.
Food of the Gods.
Although 'faultless' seems a boast, and although my boiled eggs are ok - I'm quite envious.
Try this:
Use eggs that have been at room temperature for several hours; NEVER from the fridge.
Use large eggs (for anything smaller the timings will need to be reduced by some indeterminate amount!)
Large pan of water brought to a good boil.
Put 2-4 eggs into that boiling water for four and a half minutes. (More eggs than that and the timings might need slightly extending.) Turn off the heat and let them stand for another 30 seconds. Take them out, take the top off one to eat first and smash the tops of the others, to allow the heat out and stop them cooking.
Eat with dipping soldiers.
Perhaps its from the fridge thing.
Do you have any insight on scrambled eggs? I'd say they would be my best hand in egg cookery - very slow, lots of butter, stirring madly.
Poached eggs - these are the eggs of god. I intend to keep trying.
Scrambled is the wife's forte. Wouldn't dare to tread on her toes there.
Poached eggs - just get a decent poacher. Don't ever try to cook them in a swirl of boiling water. Urgh.
You should investigate ' scrambled' yourself - buy loads of butter. Not omletting it is the key. It's a mans sort of egg dish anyway - best served very early to a sleepy girlfriend. You can even bugger up the toast if the scrambled eggs are right.
Poached - trust me this is the true way of the egg!
I'm far from good at poached eggs, but boiling water is too hot, and I'm not sure that swirling (or vinegar) helps. (edit: if I could get this right i'd be very happy)
Tomorrow morning I'm going to follow your plan with some eggs that are out of the fridge overnight.
Pro tip for poached eggs: your water should be only just wobbling on the surface, def. not boiling. Lower your unbroken eggs into it for 30 seconds, then hoick them out again and break them into the water as usual. This boils the outer layer of white so they hold together better.
Excellent tip thank you, I've never heard that one before or tried it. Will try it for breakfast tomorrow.
Ministers will need to watch what they eat in the event of a Brexit-driven food shortage. If we're all forced to eat Smash and tripe, then the first picture of someone from the government scoffing caviar in a posh restaurant could be politically lethal.
Burns Nighjt could turn out to be politically correct, for once. Spuds, neeps and sheep and cow offal.
Extraordinary Dylan selling the publishing rights to his entire back catalogue reckoned to be 600 songs. You feel that no amount of money would be enough Even the 'hundred's of million dollars' that has been discussed. To use any Dylan on an ad would be so prohibitive that you'd need a pretty huge budget to consider it and that's just one outlet.
Anyway, give me 5 minutes. Let me go back to the latest negotiation round of this food manufacturing partnership agreement I am negotiating. Not that I know anything about food manufacturing or negotiating as apparently I'm so wrong and Phillip with wot he knows is so right.
I haven't actually said you're wrong. All I've said is the supermarkets will put what they can on the shelves, which they do all the time. You've not said how that's wrong besides claims of "you know nothing". If I'm wrong, why am I wrong?
Will supermarkets let food rot rather than put it on the shelves? Will supermarkets keep empty shelves rather than put what they can get on instead?
If we get No Deal - which is starting to look horrifying possible - then the pressure for Boris to resign will be formidable. It will amount to the greatest political failure in modern British history, making Black Wednesday look like a pasty tax in comparison. There will be absolutely no reason, either for himself or anyone else, for Boris to hang around a moment longer.
Not sure. We have now normalised empty shelves via Covid. Plus no one* will notice the extra administrative burden, to whatever degree it manifests itself, save for a "weren't these Stroopwafels a bit cheaper last week" type of thing. So there is a lot of leeway for absolute total fuck up that Boris can paint as near-normal.
I have been prominent on here saying he will go (I have nine more months of my bet to run) on the basis of logic. It was obvious from the moment that TMay took office that she was manifestly unfit for it and hence was, to quote a noted newspaper editor, a "dead man walking".
Boris is equally unfit to be PM. And he will fall. Just not in 24-hr rolling news time. People who are manifestly unfit for high office generally don't stay as PM for that long. cf J Corbyn.
That said, he does look sticky because all his failings are often waved away as the behaviour of a lovable scallywag.
*no one apart those who are filling out the forms and adhering to the new system, obvs.
Ordinarily he and many of his cabinet colleagues would have been marched out of office by now. Lying and corruption aren't usually politically survivable, yet the bar to serve in a senior role appears to be having been sacked for one or the other previously.
People won't realise how bad this is until it slaps them in the face. Customs checks whether under a deal or WTO will bring the UK supply chain to a crashing halt. When it gets untangled we'll find that we're paying a lot more for less things and every retailer and manufacturer and supplier will be saying why, intercut with the reporters embedded with the 48 hour queues to cross the channel.
"This isn't the Brexit we voted for" - big price rises, mass shortages, mass unemployment. You can't hide the impacts of the end of the free market and free customs, or blame it on the other party, or positively spin it as better than what we had. As reality collapses in on people Johnson will be gone. At speed.
There usually needs to be a catalyst and your final paragraph paints a reasonably possible picture of that catalyst. But as I said we have had empty shelves in very recent memory so I'm not 100% sure he won't have a get out.
There is another factor that means we won't have empty shelves - supermarkets are quite deliberately dynamic. If a produce is unavailable and won't be available for a while they don't generally just put an "out of stock" label on its spot and leave that bit of their shelving empty - they fill the space with something else. They put a different product up instead, or they fill in with other products that would be next to it instead. So the shelves remain "full" (depending upon normal variance of how recently they were restocked) even if products are "unavailable".
If Rochdale wants to say I am wrong then let him say how I am wrong and why.
EG am I wrong and does his supermarket deliberately leave shelves empty when a stock is unavailable for a significant period of time or am I right and the supermarket will change the tickets and put different stock on the shelves instead?
Phil this is what the real world looked like earlier this year.
Thanks to panic buying which stopped in a matter of days because then people had full fridges and freezers. Its a self-correcting problem that can't go on forever.
Exactly. I appreciate it when you agree with something rather than try to argue the opposite. Thanks.
There were empty shelves because of panic buying. That's just the public for you I know what can you do but don't forget a lot of these people also voted for Brexit so we can't make any calls on their intelligence or common sense.
There were empty shelves then and there may very well be empty shelves again.
Yes if people react to no deal with panic buying then there may be some empty shelves for a few days while people panic buy.
Then people's fridges and freezers will be full and they will stop panic buying and the supermarkets will have full shelves again. Just a few days later.
Exactly as happened earlier this year. We didn't go for months with empty shelves, nor will we for months or years to come post-Brexit.
If people start panic buying in the first week of January do you think come the May elections we will still have empty shelves and panic buying going on? Don't be ridiculous! 🤦🏻♂️
You just don't understand the supply chain.
We saw an initial blitzing of certain product categories - Pasta, Toilet Rolls, Paracetamol where people went mad and bought stuff they didn't need. After that we saw major shortage across a significant number of categories caused by the major modal shift in how people eat. The lockdown closed pubs and restaurants and workspaces - all the meals that used to be eaten out were now eaten at home. Pack formats became a major issue - there wasn't a shortage in beans but there was a shortage in retail cans and a surplus of huuuuge catering cans.
Retailers were working flat out as were manufacturers trying to respond to wild swings in demand with a supply chain full of holes. Through this longer phase the gaps were not caused by panic buying at all - they were caused by supply chain disruption. We are about to have a major supply chain disruption which will cause not just short term inability to move products / materials but a long term need to try and restructure what comes from where and when.
Manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers - all expecting long term issues and price rises. What do they know about it...
Yes there will be disruption, again no shit Sherlock, I have always said there will be disruption.
The invisible hand will work its magic and we will adjust. Some things may become a bit more expensive, some things may become a bit cheaper and some customers will substitute from more expensive goods to cheaper ones - and life will go on. The wheel of time will turn.
The political wheel will also turn. The punters will remember the buckets of horse crap that have been served to them: "oven ready" and all the rest of it, and they will get very angry indeed. This will happen, even with "a deal", which is now down to hard Brexit only. With no deal, the Tories are going to be facing the kind of rage that will be scary to watch, let alone be on the receiving end of. I would feel sorry for you, but having seen the chumocracy at the wheel I´d personally like to see you all hanged.
There were empty shelves because of panic buying. That's just the public for you I know what can you do but don't forget a lot of these people also voted for Brexit so we can't make any calls on their intelligence or common sense.
There were empty shelves then and there may very well be empty shelves again.
People called 999 when KFC ran short
Food shortages due to Brexit will not be met with stoicism
How many people did? Did 17.4 million people call 999 due to KFC ?
The UK did react to food shortages with stoicism as recently as March. We got through it and life went on.
I don't think you realise how hand to mouth - and how dependent on processed food - a lot of families are because of cash and time pressures. Not being able to get a pizza, for instance, can disrupt plans and routines. That is what is being ignored in the discussion, I think.
given half the UK is being told to stay at home where are the time pressures ? You cant actually go anywhere much except the supermarket.
People have to go to work and children to school. It's common to have a family with the children home and hungry at 5pm, and one adult not till 7, and so on ...
Meals such as pizzas and so on help a lot, but if they cannot be obtained reliably ... it will be interesting to see what happens.
I take it you cant cook.
Knocking up a hot meal is a doddle whatever your budget.
So long as you like risotto.
(The ultimate 50p meal.)
couscous or noodles are the fastest thing youll cook aside from bread and wraps
My favourite quick and cheap meal is an omelette. It is dead easy and if you do it right, a sophisticated dish.
Toast and marmite with scrambled eggs on top. A bit of cheese on top of the toast that melts on impact with the hot egg if you are feeling particularly sophisticated.
The better you cook your eggs the less need for cheese and marmite. Fantastic toast is the key, and some butter on the toast. Then perfectly cooked eggs. A hint of shaved cheese perhaps and the slightest taint of marmite on the buttering knife.
All this celebratory bake off crap and you can't buy a decent loaf of bread!
We need a blokeish bake-off. Bread for cheese and pickle sandwiches, bread for bacon sandwiches, buns for burgers, buns for hotdogs. Bread for pate, and we need to get the good pate's back for this bread.
I can cook faultless boiled eggs, time after time: whites set, yolks runny.
Food of the Gods.
Last week Wor Lass burnt boiled eggs.
Forgot they were on, went to do something else, pan boiled dry, one egg exploded.
It is worrying that cases look like they are on the rise again, already.
Depressing but probably inevitable. Small crumb of hope may be the increase in lateral flow tests (at e.g. University) picking up asymptomatics. We may be catching more cases, and track and trace 'may' be getting slightly better. (I read > 70 % last week).
I'm not sure sufficient numbers of lateral flow tests are being done yet to have much effect.
Unfortunately they're not separated out at https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/testing. For yesterday, that shows 273k tests overall, 252k PCR, and 300 antibody. I guess that leaves 21k lateral flow tests, which should have a significantly lower positivity than PCR due to testing people without symptoms, so they probably don't contribute more than a few hundred cases.
So fingers crossed test & trace is playing a more significant role.
If we get No Deal - which is starting to look horrifying possible - then the pressure for Boris to resign will be formidable. It will amount to the greatest political failure in modern British history, making Black Wednesday look like a pasty tax in comparison. There will be absolutely no reason, either for himself or anyone else, for Boris to hang around a moment longer.
Not sure. We have now normalised empty shelves via Covid. Plus no one* will notice the extra administrative burden, to whatever degree it manifests itself, save for a "weren't these Stroopwafels a bit cheaper last week" type of thing. So there is a lot of leeway for absolute total fuck up that Boris can paint as near-normal.
I have been prominent on here saying he will go (I have nine more months of my bet to run) on the basis of logic. It was obvious from the moment that TMay took office that she was manifestly unfit for it and hence was, to quote a noted newspaper editor, a "dead man walking".
Boris is equally unfit to be PM. And he will fall. Just not in 24-hr rolling news time. People who are manifestly unfit for high office generally don't stay as PM for that long. cf J Corbyn.
That said, he does look sticky because all his failings are often waved away as the behaviour of a lovable scallywag.
*no one apart those who are filling out the forms and adhering to the new system, obvs.
Ordinarily he and many of his cabinet colleagues would have been marched out of office by now. Lying and corruption aren't usually politically survivable, yet the bar to serve in a senior role appears to be having been sacked for one or the other previously.
People won't realise how bad this is until it slaps them in the face. Customs checks whether under a deal or WTO will bring the UK supply chain to a crashing halt. When it gets untangled we'll find that we're paying a lot more for less things and every retailer and manufacturer and supplier will be saying why, intercut with the reporters embedded with the 48 hour queues to cross the channel.
"This isn't the Brexit we voted for" - big price rises, mass shortages, mass unemployment. You can't hide the impacts of the end of the free market and free customs, or blame it on the other party, or positively spin it as better than what we had. As reality collapses in on people Johnson will be gone. At speed.
There usually needs to be a catalyst and your final paragraph paints a reasonably possible picture of that catalyst. But as I said we have had empty shelves in very recent memory so I'm not 100% sure he won't have a get out.
There is another factor that means we won't have empty shelves - supermarkets are quite deliberately dynamic. If a produce is unavailable and won't be available for a while they don't generally just put an "out of stock" label on its spot and leave that bit of their shelving empty - they fill the space with something else. They put a different product up instead, or they fill in with other products that would be next to it instead. So the shelves remain "full" (depending upon normal variance of how recently they were restocked) even if products are "unavailable".
If Rochdale wants to say I am wrong then let him say how I am wrong and why.
EG am I wrong and does his supermarket deliberately leave shelves empty when a stock is unavailable for a significant period of time or am I right and the supermarket will change the tickets and put different stock on the shelves instead?
Phil this is what the real world looked like earlier this year.
Thanks to panic buying which stopped in a matter of days because then people had full fridges and freezers. Its a self-correcting problem that can't go on forever.
Exactly. I appreciate it when you agree with something rather than try to argue the opposite. Thanks.
There were empty shelves because of panic buying. That's just the public for you I know what can you do but don't forget a lot of these people also voted for Brexit so we can't make any calls on their intelligence or common sense.
There were empty shelves then and there may very well be empty shelves again.
Yes if people react to no deal with panic buying then there may be some empty shelves for a few days while people panic buy.
Then people's fridges and freezers will be full and they will stop panic buying and the supermarkets will have full shelves again. Just a few days later.
Exactly as happened earlier this year. We didn't go for months with empty shelves, nor will we for months or years to come post-Brexit.
If people start panic buying in the first week of January do you think come the May elections we will still have empty shelves and panic buying going on? Don't be ridiculous! 🤦🏻♂️
You just don't understand the supply chain.
We saw an initial blitzing of certain product categories - Pasta, Toilet Rolls, Paracetamol where people went mad and bought stuff they didn't need. After that we saw major shortage across a significant number of categories caused by the major modal shift in how people eat. The lockdown closed pubs and restaurants and workspaces - all the meals that used to be eaten out were now eaten at home. Pack formats became a major issue - there wasn't a shortage in beans but there was a shortage in retail cans and a surplus of huuuuge catering cans.
Retailers were working flat out as were manufacturers trying to respond to wild swings in demand with a supply chain full of holes. Through this longer phase the gaps were not caused by panic buying at all - they were caused by supply chain disruption. We are about to have a major supply chain disruption which will cause not just short term inability to move products / materials but a long term need to try and restructure what comes from where and when.
Manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers - all expecting long term issues and price rises. What do they know about it...
Yes there will be disruption, again no shit Sherlock, I have always said there will be disruption.
The invisible hand will work its magic and we will adjust. Some things may become a bit more expensive, some things may become a bit cheaper and some customers will substitute from more expensive goods to cheaper ones - and life will go on. The wheel of time will turn.
The political wheel will also turn. The punters will remember the buckets of horse crap that have been served to them: "oven ready" and all the rest of it, and they will get very angry indeed. This will happen, even with "a deal", which is now down to hard Brexit only. With no deal, the Tories are going to be facing the kind of rage that will be scary to watch, let alone be on the receiving end of. I would feel sorry for you, but having seen the chumocracy at the wheel I´d personally like to see you all hanged.
Wishing death on other commenters? How very classy.
Boris shouldn't have much to fear from that rabble - Sir Keir will help him in parliament, and the right-wing media, desperate to be vindicated for their earlier endorsement of Boris, will largely go with the government spin that Boris has pulled a blinder. It's the public Boris needs to keep on side, and he won't do that if there are only jars of gherkins at Sainsbury's.
I'm far from good at poached eggs, but boiling water is too hot, and I'm not sure that swirling (or vinegar) helps. (edit: if I could get this right i'd be very happy)
The trick is a non-stick pan
Heat the water until bubbles start rising from the bottom, but it's not a rolling boil
Drop the egg in. No vinegar. No vortex.
When is separates from the base of the pan it's cooked.
The thing I've found makes a difference is freshness of the eggs. Local eggs straight from the farm (also cheaper than supermarket, which is a bonus...) always seem to poach just fine and hold together, not a non-stick pan and not even that much care to get the water boil just right. If they've been stored for a few weeks then they break apart in the water unless you're very careful.
If we get No Deal - which is starting to look horrifying possible - then the pressure for Boris to resign will be formidable. It will amount to the greatest political failure in modern British history, making Black Wednesday look like a pasty tax in comparison. There will be absolutely no reason, either for himself or anyone else, for Boris to hang around a moment longer.
Not sure. We have now normalised empty shelves via Covid. Plus no one* will notice the extra administrative burden, to whatever degree it manifests itself, save for a "weren't these Stroopwafels a bit cheaper last week" type of thing. So there is a lot of leeway for absolute total fuck up that Boris can paint as near-normal.
I have been prominent on here saying he will go (I have nine more months of my bet to run) on the basis of logic. It was obvious from the moment that TMay took office that she was manifestly unfit for it and hence was, to quote a noted newspaper editor, a "dead man walking".
Boris is equally unfit to be PM. And he will fall. Just not in 24-hr rolling news time. People who are manifestly unfit for high office generally don't stay as PM for that long. cf J Corbyn.
That said, he does look sticky because all his failings are often waved away as the behaviour of a lovable scallywag.
*no one apart those who are filling out the forms and adhering to the new system, obvs.
Ordinarily he and many of his cabinet colleagues would have been marched out of office by now. Lying and corruption aren't usually politically survivable, yet the bar to serve in a senior role appears to be having been sacked for one or the other previously.
People won't realise how bad this is until it slaps them in the face. Customs checks whether under a deal or WTO will bring the UK supply chain to a crashing halt. When it gets untangled we'll find that we're paying a lot more for less things and every retailer and manufacturer and supplier will be saying why, intercut with the reporters embedded with the 48 hour queues to cross the channel.
"This isn't the Brexit we voted for" - big price rises, mass shortages, mass unemployment. You can't hide the impacts of the end of the free market and free customs, or blame it on the other party, or positively spin it as better than what we had. As reality collapses in on people Johnson will be gone. At speed.
There usually needs to be a catalyst and your final paragraph paints a reasonably possible picture of that catalyst. But as I said we have had empty shelves in very recent memory so I'm not 100% sure he won't have a get out.
There is another factor that means we won't have empty shelves - supermarkets are quite deliberately dynamic. If a produce is unavailable and won't be available for a while they don't generally just put an "out of stock" label on its spot and leave that bit of their shelving empty - they fill the space with something else. They put a different product up instead, or they fill in with other products that would be next to it instead. So the shelves remain "full" (depending upon normal variance of how recently they were restocked) even if products are "unavailable".
If Rochdale wants to say I am wrong then let him say how I am wrong and why.
EG am I wrong and does his supermarket deliberately leave shelves empty when a stock is unavailable for a significant period of time or am I right and the supermarket will change the tickets and put different stock on the shelves instead?
Phil this is what the real world looked like earlier this year.
Thanks to panic buying which stopped in a matter of days because then people had full fridges and freezers. Its a self-correcting problem that can't go on forever.
Exactly. I appreciate it when you agree with something rather than try to argue the opposite. Thanks.
There were empty shelves because of panic buying. That's just the public for you I know what can you do but don't forget a lot of these people also voted for Brexit so we can't make any calls on their intelligence or common sense.
There were empty shelves then and there may very well be empty shelves again.
Yes if people react to no deal with panic buying then there may be some empty shelves for a few days while people panic buy.
Then people's fridges and freezers will be full and they will stop panic buying and the supermarkets will have full shelves again. Just a few days later.
Exactly as happened earlier this year. We didn't go for months with empty shelves, nor will we for months or years to come post-Brexit.
If people start panic buying in the first week of January do you think come the May elections we will still have empty shelves and panic buying going on? Don't be ridiculous! 🤦🏻♂️
You just don't understand the supply chain.
We saw an initial blitzing of certain product categories - Pasta, Toilet Rolls, Paracetamol where people went mad and bought stuff they didn't need. After that we saw major shortage across a significant number of categories caused by the major modal shift in how people eat. The lockdown closed pubs and restaurants and workspaces - all the meals that used to be eaten out were now eaten at home. Pack formats became a major issue - there wasn't a shortage in beans but there was a shortage in retail cans and a surplus of huuuuge catering cans.
Retailers were working flat out as were manufacturers trying to respond to wild swings in demand with a supply chain full of holes. Through this longer phase the gaps were not caused by panic buying at all - they were caused by supply chain disruption. We are about to have a major supply chain disruption which will cause not just short term inability to move products / materials but a long term need to try and restructure what comes from where and when.
Manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers - all expecting long term issues and price rises. What do they know about it...
Yes there will be disruption, again no shit Sherlock, I have always said there will be disruption.
The invisible hand will work its magic and we will adjust. Some things may become a bit more expensive, some things may become a bit cheaper and some customers will substitute from more expensive goods to cheaper ones - and life will go on. The wheel of time will turn.
The political wheel will also turn. The punters will remember the buckets of horse crap that have been served to them: "oven ready" and all the rest of it, and they will get very angry indeed. This will happen, even with "a deal", which is now down to hard Brexit only. With no deal, the Tories are going to be facing the kind of rage that will be scary to watch, let alone be on the receiving end of. I would feel sorry for you, but having seen the chumocracy at the wheel I´d personally like to see you all hanged.
Ah well, escaping the rope.
It's certain that the chumocracy as you describe pays for your existance.
If we get No Deal - which is starting to look horrifying possible - then the pressure for Boris to resign will be formidable. It will amount to the greatest political failure in modern British history, making Black Wednesday look like a pasty tax in comparison. There will be absolutely no reason, either for himself or anyone else, for Boris to hang around a moment longer.
Not sure. We have now normalised empty shelves via Covid. Plus no one* will notice the extra administrative burden, to whatever degree it manifests itself, save for a "weren't these Stroopwafels a bit cheaper last week" type of thing. So there is a lot of leeway for absolute total fuck up that Boris can paint as near-normal.
I have been prominent on here saying he will go (I have nine more months of my bet to run) on the basis of logic. It was obvious from the moment that TMay took office that she was manifestly unfit for it and hence was, to quote a noted newspaper editor, a "dead man walking".
Boris is equally unfit to be PM. And he will fall. Just not in 24-hr rolling news time. People who are manifestly unfit for high office generally don't stay as PM for that long. cf J Corbyn.
That said, he does look sticky because all his failings are often waved away as the behaviour of a lovable scallywag.
*no one apart those who are filling out the forms and adhering to the new system, obvs.
Ordinarily he and many of his cabinet colleagues would have been marched out of office by now. Lying and corruption aren't usually politically survivable, yet the bar to serve in a senior role appears to be having been sacked for one or the other previously.
People won't realise how bad this is until it slaps them in the face. Customs checks whether under a deal or WTO will bring the UK supply chain to a crashing halt. When it gets untangled we'll find that we're paying a lot more for less things and every retailer and manufacturer and supplier will be saying why, intercut with the reporters embedded with the 48 hour queues to cross the channel.
"This isn't the Brexit we voted for" - big price rises, mass shortages, mass unemployment. You can't hide the impacts of the end of the free market and free customs, or blame it on the other party, or positively spin it as better than what we had. As reality collapses in on people Johnson will be gone. At speed.
There usually needs to be a catalyst and your final paragraph paints a reasonably possible picture of that catalyst. But as I said we have had empty shelves in very recent memory so I'm not 100% sure he won't have a get out.
There is another factor that means we won't have empty shelves - supermarkets are quite deliberately dynamic. If a produce is unavailable and won't be available for a while they don't generally just put an "out of stock" label on its spot and leave that bit of their shelving empty - they fill the space with something else. They put a different product up instead, or they fill in with other products that would be next to it instead. So the shelves remain "full" (depending upon normal variance of how recently they were restocked) even if products are "unavailable".
If Rochdale wants to say I am wrong then let him say how I am wrong and why.
EG am I wrong and does his supermarket deliberately leave shelves empty when a stock is unavailable for a significant period of time or am I right and the supermarket will change the tickets and put different stock on the shelves instead?
Phil this is what the real world looked like earlier this year.
Thanks to panic buying which stopped in a matter of days because then people had full fridges and freezers. Its a self-correcting problem that can't go on forever.
Exactly. I appreciate it when you agree with something rather than try to argue the opposite. Thanks.
There were empty shelves because of panic buying. That's just the public for you I know what can you do but don't forget a lot of these people also voted for Brexit so we can't make any calls on their intelligence or common sense.
There were empty shelves then and there may very well be empty shelves again.
Yes if people react to no deal with panic buying then there may be some empty shelves for a few days while people panic buy.
Then people's fridges and freezers will be full and they will stop panic buying and the supermarkets will have full shelves again. Just a few days later.
Exactly as happened earlier this year. We didn't go for months with empty shelves, nor will we for months or years to come post-Brexit.
If people start panic buying in the first week of January do you think come the May elections we will still have empty shelves and panic buying going on? Don't be ridiculous! 🤦🏻♂️
You just don't understand the supply chain.
We saw an initial blitzing of certain product categories - Pasta, Toilet Rolls, Paracetamol where people went mad and bought stuff they didn't need. After that we saw major shortage across a significant number of categories caused by the major modal shift in how people eat. The lockdown closed pubs and restaurants and workspaces - all the meals that used to be eaten out were now eaten at home. Pack formats became a major issue - there wasn't a shortage in beans but there was a shortage in retail cans and a surplus of huuuuge catering cans.
Retailers were working flat out as were manufacturers trying to respond to wild swings in demand with a supply chain full of holes. Through this longer phase the gaps were not caused by panic buying at all - they were caused by supply chain disruption. We are about to have a major supply chain disruption which will cause not just short term inability to move products / materials but a long term need to try and restructure what comes from where and when.
Manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers - all expecting long term issues and price rises. What do they know about it...
Yes there will be disruption, again no shit Sherlock, I have always said there will be disruption.
The invisible hand will work its magic and we will adjust. Some things may become a bit more expensive, some things may become a bit cheaper and some customers will substitute from more expensive goods to cheaper ones - and life will go on. The wheel of time will turn.
The political wheel will also turn. The punters will remember the buckets of horse crap that have been served to them: "oven ready" and all the rest of it, and they will get very angry indeed. This will happen, even with "a deal", which is now down to hard Brexit only. With no deal, the Tories are going to be facing the kind of rage that will be scary to watch, let alone be on the receiving end of. I would feel sorry for you, but having seen the chumocracy at the wheel I´d personally like to see you all hanged.
Boris shouldn't have much to fear from that rabble - Sir Keir will help him in parliament, and the right-wing media, desperate to be vindicated for their earlier endorsement of Boris, will largely go with the government spin that Boris has pulled a blinder. It's the public Boris needs to keep on side, and he won't do that if there are only jars of gherkins at Sainsbury's.
Goodness me.
Delusion a mile thick.
After covid, which has infuriated many tory voters, a surrender brexit bought with labour votes is suicide for the conservatives. Suicide.
I'm far from good at poached eggs, but boiling water is too hot, and I'm not sure that swirling (or vinegar) helps. (edit: if I could get this right i'd be very happy)
The trick is a non-stick pan
Heat the water until bubbles start rising from the bottom, but it's not a rolling boil
Drop the egg in. No vinegar. No vortex.
When is separates from the base of the pan it's cooked.
The thing I've found makes a difference is freshness of the eggs. Local eggs straight from the farm (also cheaper than supermarket, which is a bonus...) always seem to poach just fine and hold together, not a non-stick pan and not even that much care to get the water boil just right. If they've been stored for a few weeks then they break apart in the water unless you're very careful.
I've always found the trick is to put the egg in a mug, and then put the mug in the water. Leave it there for about about 30 seconds or so, and the egg whites begin (very slightly) to firm. You can then (still very, very gently) pour the egg out of the mug.
Big thank you to everybody for the answers re milk, bread and root vegetables.
Milk: Yes I have some frozen but it takes up a lot of room and I can't fit any more. I don't like the taste of long life milk but given Rochdale's concern about packaging I will stock up on some.
Bread: Yes I noticed that as Selebian says bread was still available even when flour was very hard to get hold of. Didn't know our main flour imports were from Canada, thanks for that. I have some stock of bread flour, think I will get some more just in case.
Root veg: No greenhouse (or green fingers ;-) ) unfortunately - I have been thinking I could grown my own onions, carrots, potatoes if I had any idea about gardening. But I know local farmers round here do root veg boxes.
I don't like beetroot (whether Beethoven-reared or otherwise) - sorry MattW! But thanks for the tip about freezing eggs - they won't take up much room in that form, either.
I'm hoping most of this won't be necessary - but prefer to "Be Prepared". Nothing will be wasted anyway. At some point in the future I am going to have some very small food bills as all this gets unwound!
Root vegetables can be bought in frozen form, or in tins. Unopened tins can be donated to foodbanks in six months or so, if Brexit has gone smoothly.
Cooking tips & skills -- the easiest chef to follow on Youtube is, perhaps surprisingly, Gordon Ramsay. But once you've got the basics down pat, remember there is no "one true recipe" for anything.
Extraordinary Dylan selling the publishing rights to his entire back catalogue reckoned to be 600 songs. You feel that no amount of money would be enough Even the 'hundred's of million dollars' that has been discussed. To use any Dylan on an ad would be so prohibitive that you'd need a pretty huge budget to consider it and that's just one outlet.
Maybe he feels that at 80 next birthday he would rather pass on the rights now while he can benefit from the proceeds. Maybe he will even stop touring! (Though I see he has 30 or more dates booked for next year...) Not that he makes that much from touring as he keeps prices low - he just loves doing it I think.
If we get No Deal - which is starting to look horrifying possible - then the pressure for Boris to resign will be formidable. It will amount to the greatest political failure in modern British history, making Black Wednesday look like a pasty tax in comparison. There will be absolutely no reason, either for himself or anyone else, for Boris to hang around a moment longer.
Not sure. We have now normalised empty shelves via Covid. Plus no one* will notice the extra administrative burden, to whatever degree it manifests itself, save for a "weren't these Stroopwafels a bit cheaper last week" type of thing. So there is a lot of leeway for absolute total fuck up that Boris can paint as near-normal.
I have been prominent on here saying he will go (I have nine more months of my bet to run) on the basis of logic. It was obvious from the moment that TMay took office that she was manifestly unfit for it and hence was, to quote a noted newspaper editor, a "dead man walking".
Boris is equally unfit to be PM. And he will fall. Just not in 24-hr rolling news time. People who are manifestly unfit for high office generally don't stay as PM for that long. cf J Corbyn.
That said, he does look sticky because all his failings are often waved away as the behaviour of a lovable scallywag.
*no one apart those who are filling out the forms and adhering to the new system, obvs.
Ordinarily he and many of his cabinet colleagues would have been marched out of office by now. Lying and corruption aren't usually politically survivable, yet the bar to serve in a senior role appears to be having been sacked for one or the other previously.
People won't realise how bad this is until it slaps them in the face. Customs checks whether under a deal or WTO will bring the UK supply chain to a crashing halt. When it gets untangled we'll find that we're paying a lot more for less things and every retailer and manufacturer and supplier will be saying why, intercut with the reporters embedded with the 48 hour queues to cross the channel.
"This isn't the Brexit we voted for" - big price rises, mass shortages, mass unemployment. You can't hide the impacts of the end of the free market and free customs, or blame it on the other party, or positively spin it as better than what we had. As reality collapses in on people Johnson will be gone. At speed.
There usually needs to be a catalyst and your final paragraph paints a reasonably possible picture of that catalyst. But as I said we have had empty shelves in very recent memory so I'm not 100% sure he won't have a get out.
There is another factor that means we won't have empty shelves - supermarkets are quite deliberately dynamic. If a produce is unavailable and won't be available for a while they don't generally just put an "out of stock" label on its spot and leave that bit of their shelving empty - they fill the space with something else. They put a different product up instead, or they fill in with other products that would be next to it instead. So the shelves remain "full" (depending upon normal variance of how recently they were restocked) even if products are "unavailable".
If Rochdale wants to say I am wrong then let him say how I am wrong and why.
EG am I wrong and does his supermarket deliberately leave shelves empty when a stock is unavailable for a significant period of time or am I right and the supermarket will change the tickets and put different stock on the shelves instead?
Phil this is what the real world looked like earlier this year.
Thanks to panic buying which stopped in a matter of days because then people had full fridges and freezers. Its a self-correcting problem that can't go on forever.
Exactly. I appreciate it when you agree with something rather than try to argue the opposite. Thanks.
There were empty shelves because of panic buying. That's just the public for you I know what can you do but don't forget a lot of these people also voted for Brexit so we can't make any calls on their intelligence or common sense.
There were empty shelves then and there may very well be empty shelves again.
Yes if people react to no deal with panic buying then there may be some empty shelves for a few days while people panic buy.
Then people's fridges and freezers will be full and they will stop panic buying and the supermarkets will have full shelves again. Just a few days later.
Exactly as happened earlier this year. We didn't go for months with empty shelves, nor will we for months or years to come post-Brexit.
If people start panic buying in the first week of January do you think come the May elections we will still have empty shelves and panic buying going on? Don't be ridiculous! 🤦🏻♂️
You just don't understand the supply chain.
We saw an initial blitzing of certain product categories - Pasta, Toilet Rolls, Paracetamol where people went mad and bought stuff they didn't need. After that we saw major shortage across a significant number of categories caused by the major modal shift in how people eat. The lockdown closed pubs and restaurants and workspaces - all the meals that used to be eaten out were now eaten at home. Pack formats became a major issue - there wasn't a shortage in beans but there was a shortage in retail cans and a surplus of huuuuge catering cans.
Retailers were working flat out as were manufacturers trying to respond to wild swings in demand with a supply chain full of holes. Through this longer phase the gaps were not caused by panic buying at all - they were caused by supply chain disruption. We are about to have a major supply chain disruption which will cause not just short term inability to move products / materials but a long term need to try and restructure what comes from where and when.
Manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers - all expecting long term issues and price rises. What do they know about it...
Yes there will be disruption, again no shit Sherlock, I have always said there will be disruption.
The invisible hand will work its magic and we will adjust. Some things may become a bit more expensive, some things may become a bit cheaper and some customers will substitute from more expensive goods to cheaper ones - and life will go on. The wheel of time will turn.
The political wheel will also turn. The punters will remember the buckets of horse crap that have been served to them: "oven ready" and all the rest of it, and they will get very angry indeed. This will happen, even with "a deal", which is now down to hard Brexit only. With no deal, the Tories are going to be facing the kind of rage that will be scary to watch, let alone be on the receiving end of. I would feel sorry for you, but having seen the chumocracy at the wheel I´d personally like to see you all hanged.
We can all disgree but wanting people hanged is crossing the line
Haven't seen any comments on this but Republican in Pennsylvania has appealed PA Supreme Court ruling to SCOTUS.
It's in Alito's territory - Alito originally requested evidence by 9th Dec (standard 6 day deadline) - ie after safe harbour deadline - but subsequently revised this to 9am on 8th Dec (he could have requested it much quicker if he had wanted to).
Anyway some kind of ruling may well be issued tomorrow - link:
Trade isn't going to halt though. Trade will still happen even if it is disrupted.
But yes for a couple of weeks if we are disrupted it's perfect possible to live off potatoes, root vegetables, peas, beans, cabbages, apples, lamb, seafood etc.
But it won't be necessary. It is panic mongering to suggest it would be. Disruption doesn't mean an end to trade, it never has done.
Trade will stop until they find a way to remove the bottleneck. We know the 12-20 hour queues to cross the EU border with a far smaller volume of trucks at a land border. So suggesting 48 hours plus delays for our sea border is sensible. As you can't tie up the truck fleet in that kind of queue they won't be sent. An eerie calm where the greatly reduced cross border traffic only waits a few hours as opposed to days.
Problem is that if you step up traffic it backs up to a stop again. I know that you disagree with all of this despite the endless evidence that it is facts. Then again you've spent all afternoon telling me about how food supply chains and supermarkets work in a way that would be funny (they'll overface empty chillers with beans FFS) if you weren't so serious.
I never said they'll overface empty chillers with beans.
Why wouldn't they overface empty chillers with cold produce we have a surplus of?
Be a good opportunity to have a sale on overfaced lamb perhaps?
Jesus. Like I said, have no idea about how supply chain works.
The lamb that gets exported to the EU - if there is a disruption to international trade then why can't that be sold in the UK?
If there's something I'm missing then why not educate me? My local Morrisons wraps up its meat on-site with the in-store butcher, I appreciate not every supermarket does that but why can't lamb if we have a surplus of it be shipped to the supermarkets and sold there?
Haven't. A. Clue. Mate. I already posted on this earlier. A "surplus" of "lamb" is what - specifics please. In the UK we have a taste for legs of lamb from young animals. We import from markets like New Zealand because we eat more legs than we have lambs. At the same time we export "lamb" (referred to in the trade rather tellingly as "sheepmeat") - the parts of the animal and the older animals that people don't eat. Same with pigs and cows. We mainly export full and half carcases - meat that we don't eat.
So what you are saying is don't worry. Yes there is a shortage of Legs and Shanks of lamb. But look here, we have overfaced it with a tray of mutton. You MUST buy it. For Britain.
There were empty shelves because of panic buying. That's just the public for you I know what can you do but don't forget a lot of these people also voted for Brexit so we can't make any calls on their intelligence or common sense.
There were empty shelves then and there may very well be empty shelves again.
People called 999 when KFC ran short
Food shortages due to Brexit will not be met with stoicism
How many people did? Did 17.4 million people call 999 due to KFC ?
The UK did react to food shortages with stoicism as recently as March. We got through it and life went on.
I don't think you realise how hand to mouth - and how dependent on processed food - a lot of families are because of cash and time pressures. Not being able to get a pizza, for instance, can disrupt plans and routines. That is what is being ignored in the discussion, I think.
given half the UK is being told to stay at home where are the time pressures ? You cant actually go anywhere much except the supermarket.
People have to go to work and children to school. It's common to have a family with the children home and hungry at 5pm, and one adult not till 7, and so on ...
Meals such as pizzas and so on help a lot, but if they cannot be obtained reliably ... it will be interesting to see what happens.
I take it you cant cook.
Knocking up a hot meal is a doddle whatever your budget.
So long as you like risotto.
(The ultimate 50p meal.)
couscous or noodles are the fastest thing youll cook aside from bread and wraps
My favourite quick and cheap meal is an omelette. It is dead easy and if you do it right, a sophisticated dish.
Toast and marmite with scrambled eggs on top. A bit of cheese on top of the toast that melts on impact with the hot egg if you are feeling particularly sophisticated.
The better you cook your eggs the less need for cheese and marmite. Fantastic toast is the key, and some butter on the toast. Then perfectly cooked eggs. A hint of shaved cheese perhaps and the slightest taint of marmite on the buttering knife.
All this celebratory bake off crap and you can't buy a decent loaf of bread!
We need a blokeish bake-off. Bread for cheese and pickle sandwiches, bread for bacon sandwiches, buns for burgers, buns for hotdogs. Bread for pate, and we need to get the good pate's back for this bread.
I can cook faultless boiled eggs, time after time: whites set, yolks runny.
Food of the Gods.
Although 'faultless' seems a boast, and although my boiled eggs are ok - I'm quite envious.
Try this:
Use eggs that have been at room temperature for several hours; NEVER from the fridge.
Use large eggs (for anything smaller the timings will need to be reduced by some indeterminate amount!)
Large pan of water brought to a good boil.
Put 2-4 eggs into that boiling water for four and a half minutes. (More eggs than that and the timings might need slightly extending.) Turn off the heat and let them stand for another 30 seconds. Take them out, take the top off one to eat first and smash the tops of the others, to allow the heat out and stop them cooking.
Eat with dipping soldiers.
Perhaps its from the fridge thing.
Do you have any insight on scrambled eggs? I'd say they would be my best hand in egg cookery - very slow, lots of butter, stirring madly.
Poached eggs - these are the eggs of god. I intend to keep trying.
Scrambled is the wife's forte. Wouldn't dare to tread on her toes there.
Poached eggs - just get a decent poacher. Don't ever try to cook them in a swirl of boiling water. Urgh.
You should investigate ' scrambled' yourself - buy loads of butter. Not omletting it is the key. It's a mans sort of egg dish anyway - best served very early to a sleepy girlfriend. You can even bugger up the toast if the scrambled eggs are right.
Poached - trust me this is the true way of the egg!
I'm far from good at poached eggs, but boiling water is too hot, and I'm not sure that swirling (or vinegar) helps. (edit: if I could get this right i'd be very happy)
Tomorrow morning I'm going to follow your plan with some eggs that are out of the fridge overnight.
Pro tip for poached eggs: your water should be only just wobbling on the surface, def. not boiling. Lower your unbroken eggs into it for 30 seconds, then hoick them out again and break them into the water as usual. This boils the outer layer of white so they hold together better.
That's very similar to me - except I use the intermediate step of breaking the eggs into a mug.
What is the obsession with adding dairy products to scrambled egg?
Eggs.
Seasoned.
Scrambled.
Perfection.
Because it tastes great, and is good for you. Here's my ultimate (lazy) scrambled egg recipe:
Get a very good non-stick frying pan. Switch on the ring (low heat), and dump in a good blob of butter (I use unsalted), lots of salt (I use Himalayan pink), lots of pepper, and sometimes some coconut oil too. Instead of milk, put in a good blob of natural yoghurt. Stir. Break the eggs straight into the pan - I usually do three per person, sometimes 4. They will slowly start to fry, but there's ample time to break them up with a wooden spoon. Continue to stir. Keep the ring on low and don't be tempted to turn it up high to get the eggs cooked faster. Stop when the eggs are still creamy but not runny.
I'm far from good at poached eggs, but boiling water is too hot, and I'm not sure that swirling (or vinegar) helps. (edit: if I could get this right i'd be very happy)
The trick is a non-stick pan
Heat the water until bubbles start rising from the bottom, but it's not a rolling boil
Drop the egg in. No vinegar. No vortex.
When is separates from the base of the pan it's cooked.
The thing I've found makes a difference is freshness of the eggs. Local eggs straight from the farm (also cheaper than supermarket, which is a bonus...) always seem to poach just fine and hold together, not a non-stick pan and not even that much care to get the water boil just right. If they've been stored for a few weeks then they break apart in the water unless you're very careful.
You guys are all so old school. Break the egg into a ramekin (or deep saucer / small bowl will do), with 100ml of water. Microwave for 60 seconds.
Comments
Next One: Crepe Suzette (ie pancake with orange juice and a lighter.)
I'm already doing my best to eat as much local sheep and fish as it is ...
Edit: but not trying to be rude. Your point is a good one, generally.
Bread. Depends on the wheat harvest - which this year was catastrophic (-40% of normal). Which means imports needed at scale...
Root Vegetables. Frankly this is an area where Brexit can help farming as too much gets imported to save pennies on UK grown. However as with so many other sectors what people like to eat and what we're capable of growing have diverged - far less demand for things like Turnips...
But yes for a couple of weeks if we are disrupted it's perfect possible to live off potatoes, root vegetables, peas, beans, cabbages, apples, lamb, seafood etc.
But it won't be necessary. It is panic mongering to suggest it would be. Disruption doesn't mean an end to trade, it never has done.
Long life milk is quite good and keeps for months. Cheese also freezes. As do lightly beaten eggs - surpisingly.
I just planted the microgreens for my Christmas Lunch, so I have the purple glow from my conservatory which may make neighbours think I'm growing cannabis.
Similarly the NI logistics industry has been screaming for months that it is only viable with loads in both directions. Major disruption can sink many of them.
So instead of the usual situation - where UK companies have an Irish subsidiary (Tesco, Aldi etc etc) it'll be the other way round, with RoI chains supplying the north.
Use eggs that have been at room temperature for several hours; NEVER from the fridge.
Use large eggs (for anything smaller the timings will need to be reduced by some indeterminate amount!)
Large pan of water brought to a good boil.
Put 2-4 eggs into that boiling water for four and a half minutes. (More eggs than that and the timings might need slightly extending.) Turn off the heat and let them stand for another 30 seconds. Take them out, take the top off one to eat first and smash the tops of the others, to allow the heat out and stop them cooking.
Eat with dipping soldiers.
https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/smoked-haddock-kedgeree
1. Modal shift in how we eat due to the closedown of hospitality and workplace / school feeding - same number of meal occasions but significant shift in where the food is obtained from
2. Production lines set up to produce large packs for foodservice separate to retail. Lack of additional capacity to make smaller pack formats or rip & tip unwanted large packs into smaller pack sizes
3. Lack of packaging due to a run on materials.
Do you have any insight on scrambled eggs? I'd say they would be my best hand in egg cookery - very slow, lots of butter, stirring madly.
Poached eggs - these are the eggs of god. I intend to keep trying.
We do have it quite often ( simpler, without most of the spices but with a few frozen prawn s tthrown in if the fish is a bit small). Use the better undyed smoked haddock from the van - though still noty that costly.
Poached eggs - just get a decent poacher. Don't ever try to cook them in a swirl of boiling water. Urgh.
Problem is that if you step up traffic it backs up to a stop again. I know that you disagree with all of this despite the endless evidence that it is facts. Then again you've spent all afternoon telling me about how food supply chains and supermarkets work in a way that would be funny (they'll overface empty chillers with beans FFS) if you weren't so serious.
3) Packaging used to be paper no reason we can't go back to having our meat wrapped up for us at the meat counter like in my youth and our veggies loose and put in a paper bag. Again also better for the environment aren't we constantly told we use to much plastic?
(Real kippers, not the fillets from the supermarket that are the same colour as Donald Trump's hairdo.)
Different in the US
Why wouldn't they overface empty chillers with cold produce we have a surplus of?
Be a good opportunity to have a sale on overfaced lamb perhaps?
Cashi s a lot easier for me anyway in this poxy era sans car.
*Another local charity which a family friend runs was hit by someone scanning their emails and slipping in dodgy account details - a three figure donation was diverted.
On the other hand it's nice to see that a lack of knowledge still doesn't stop Philip "debating" with experts in the field.
I really do wonder what he does for a living given that he manages to post on here all day, every day.
a) KFC ran out of something or other and
b) There was a shortage of petrol a few years ago, and there were near riots?
Poached - trust me this is the true way of the egg!
I'm far from good at poached eggs, but boiling water is too hot, and I'm not sure that swirling (or vinegar) helps. (edit: if I could get this right i'd be very happy)
Tomorrow morning I'm going to follow your plan with some eggs that are out of the fridge overnight.
Covid was a natural disaster, the like of which few of us have experienced in our lives. At least to start with, people cut the government a lot of slack. (Not all of it deserved. The faffing around in mid March has cost this country a huge amount in both lives and treasure.) Despite that, people started getting impatient after a few months.
Brexit, especially this form of Brexit, is a political decision, actively sought by the current government team...
Milk: Yes I have some frozen but it takes up a lot of room and I can't fit any more. I don't like the taste of long life milk but given Rochdale's concern about packaging I will stock up on some.
Bread: Yes I noticed that as Selebian says bread was still available even when flour was very hard to get hold of. Didn't know our main flour imports were from Canada, thanks for that. I have some stock of bread flour, think I will get some more just in case.
Root veg: No greenhouse (or green fingers ;-) ) unfortunately - I have been thinking I could grown my own onions, carrots, potatoes if I had any idea about gardening. But I know local farmers round here do root veg boxes.
I don't like beetroot (whether Beethoven-reared or otherwise) - sorry MattW! But thanks for the tip about freezing eggs - they won't take up much room in that form, either.
I'm hoping most of this won't be necessary - but prefer to "Be Prepared". Nothing will be wasted anyway. At some point in the future I am going to have some very small food bills as all this gets unwound!
And packaging? There is a definite push towards loose produce again albeit on a small scale - or there was until the pox got people afeared of touching stuff that other people have touched. Harder to do meat and fish as self service like veg - the supermarkets are largely removing expensive to run counters for pre-packed. They could be brought back but at a decent oncost that consumers will have to pay.
What happened to Mr Johnson's much trumpeted obesity campaign post his brush with Covid BTW? I don't live in Scotland, whicvh may explain why I never saw a cheep more about it.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2012/sep/16/simon-hopkinson-how-boil-eggs
Best halved and eaten on a buttered thin sour rye crisp.
On other matters, I believe we're approaching the fabled cliff-edge car-crash scenario. And in a pandemic too, to add to the excitement!
Heat the water until bubbles start rising from the bottom, but it's not a rolling boil
Drop the egg in. No vinegar. No vortex.
When is separates from the base of the pan it's cooked.
By the time you allow for shipping delays (land / weather disruption at sea) you have to contract a long way out to ensure the stuff arrives on time for your production plan. There is minimal flexibility - you commit and it arrives when it arrives.
edit: he's now redeemed himself by using "we" and "us".
If there's something I'm missing then why not educate me? My local Morrisons wraps up its meat on-site with the in-store butcher, I appreciate not every supermarket does that but why can't lamb if we have a surplus of it be shipped to the supermarkets and sold there?
Eggs.
Seasoned.
Scrambled.
Perfection.
Will supermarkets let food rot rather than put it on the shelves? Will supermarkets keep empty shelves rather than put what they can get on instead?
Forgot they were on, went to do something else, pan boiled dry, one egg exploded.
Definitely no runny yolk!
Unfortunately they're not separated out at https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/testing. For yesterday, that shows 273k tests overall, 252k PCR, and 300 antibody. I guess that leaves 21k lateral flow tests, which should have a significantly lower positivity than PCR due to testing people without symptoms, so they probably don't contribute more than a few hundred cases.
So fingers crossed test & trace is playing a more significant role.
All the Cards
Plenty of Root Vegetables
We have never negotiated like one.
A state that prized its sovereignty in chief would have headed for a WTO brexit immediately and by default.
It's certain that the chumocracy as you describe pays for your existance.
That's fine though. You can drift by.
Delusion a mile thick.
After covid, which has infuriated many tory voters, a surrender brexit bought with labour votes is suicide for the conservatives. Suicide.
Result, perfectly serviceable poached eggs.
Cooking tips & skills -- the easiest chef to follow on Youtube is, perhaps surprisingly, Gordon Ramsay. But once you've got the basics down pat, remember there is no "one true recipe" for anything.
And it worked too. Until it didn’t.
It's in Alito's territory - Alito originally requested evidence by 9th Dec (standard 6 day deadline) - ie after safe harbour deadline - but subsequently revised this to 9am on 8th Dec (he could have requested it much quicker if he had wanted to).
Anyway some kind of ruling may well be issued tomorrow - link:
https://reason.com/volokh/2020/12/06/circuit-justice-alito-walks-back-de-facto-denial-of-pennsylvania-emergency-appeal/
So what you are saying is don't worry. Yes there is a shortage of Legs and Shanks of lamb. But look here, we have overfaced it with a tray of mutton. You MUST buy it. For Britain.
A man who forced through a measure that split his party for a generation. For the Corn Law repeal, read Johnson's Brexit.
Except this time, I think it would be more than a generation. It would be for ever.
The big political divide for the foreseeable is populist versus globalist and the tories are fatally split, there.
Get a very good non-stick frying pan. Switch on the ring (low heat), and dump in a good blob of butter (I use unsalted), lots of salt (I use Himalayan pink), lots of pepper, and sometimes some coconut oil too. Instead of milk, put in a good blob of natural yoghurt. Stir. Break the eggs straight into the pan - I usually do three per person, sometimes 4. They will slowly start to fry, but there's ample time to break them up with a wooden spoon. Continue to stir. Keep the ring on low and don't be tempted to turn it up high to get the eggs cooked faster. Stop when the eggs are still creamy but not runny.
You are welcome!