I have flour, yeast and water (but no salt). I will survive.

I've just seen the following at my local Tesco:

I defy you not to panic just a little bit when faced with bare shelves in a supermarket.  

It reminded me to blog about a programme I heard on the radio the other day.  The Food Programme focused on bread, and featured a number of small-scale bakers.  I found it really inspiring.  They talked to:

• The Handmade Bakery - a Community Supported Bakery in Slaithwaite, where people buy bread weekly on a subscription basis - similar to the Community Supported Agriculture scheme I've blogged about at Swillington.
• A guy who knocked on his neighbours' doors and asked them if he could bake bread for them.  He now has a nice little business.
• A woman who is using small-scale breadmaking as a way to encourage young people to develop a few entrepreneurial skills.

It's easy to dismiss this kind of thing as self-obsessed middle-class food snobbery, and in some cases I'm sure it is just that.  But there is something quite profound in the desire of increasing numbers of people to take more control of where their food comes from.  It's got something to do with the empty shelves above, or perhaps more importantly, whose shelves they are. 

Comments

[John Gray]

Well, it may be easy to panic. But I think sights like this - which after all are common in many countries of the world - are an important wake-up call for this country. The more we understand the interconnected nature of the society we live in, and the fragility of the infrastructure to keeping things 'normal', the better we can respond to predictions of the unravelling of the infrastructure. The recent debate on food strategy is a huge step forward, given that in the future we may no longer have the luxury of turning oil into food via oil-dependent farms. Spikes in the oil price two years ago, countries banning exports of food, and - as a contrast - the incredible edible Todmorden experience: all these are pointers. We have time to plan. Don't panic; but a little unsettling of complacency may be a good first step forward.