A few weeks back, I called the current situation a hurricane, but with lights and power.
So very wrong, that analogy. The same colleague who asked about prepping just got garden produce hand-delivered, at an acceptable social distance, to his front door. Yesterday, while going to our closed-down campus for a few books, I made my egg-and-greens deliveries that usually get dropped off at academic departments.
First difference: one does not self-isolate during a hurricane.
My university, friends, is a ghost town. The few students left are being cared for, as we prepare for getting them home. As for those already home, we are using technologies I know well to provide remote learning.
Meanwhile, I get edgy reports of increased gun sales, mostly by folk who never before owned one. Oh, what could possibly go wrong? Even at online forums for reloading, no hotbed of gun-control sentiment, there's a good deal of concern about these folk who are prepping without much of a plan.
Hence, my call for cornmeal, not gunpowder. While shopping with my normal weekly list, recently, I noticed a curious phenomenon: in addition to predictable shortages of cleaning supplies and toilet paper, folks out here in the country had run low the stocks of corn meal, wheat flour, oil, sugar.
Good on them: Southerners may be recalling Granny's stories of hard times past. These are basics, like beans or rice, that keep body and soul together.
People might learn how to cook again. I will never forget, on my part, my dad's tales of onion sandwiches in the Great Depression. He was not overly fond of onions, afterward. My mom told me how dad and his Lebanese mother would go to a big field, now the site of a downtown Lowes, to pick dandelion greens for dinner.
We are far from that point, but I'd say that I see hopeful signs in pieces like this from the New York Times, about how cornbread is making a comeback during these uncertain times. Closer to home, Joel Salatin wrote one of his stronger posts about how the pandemic might be a time of close reflection upon what is essential: keeping a larder, staying home with loved ones, avoiding frivolous expenses, and the like. Joel and I disagree on many things, but with that post I'm with him 100%.
You can learn to cook, as the cashier at my local organic/local market told some fretting Gen-Zs who had no experience. When the restaurants close, you'll have YouTube and allrecipes.com.
Use them. And for God's sake, instead of spending money to binge on some TV show, get some DVDs free from the local library. That closed? Read a good book.
Next up for me? After Amin Maalouf's Samarkand, I'm going to embark on a virtual tour of London with Peter Ackroyd’s London: A Biography. I'll get back to that favorite city of mine, in time. Every journey teaches me something, especially the ones through the seasons of the year. This was our first winter with lettuce and greens, all through the cool months (we did not have snow or a real winter). We used a low tunnel to stretch the fall into March.
So will these times we are in. How about learning to make cornbread?
