Keep shopping like you did during lockdown
No, not stockpiling. Nobody wants more stockpiling.
But in other ways, lockdown has changed how we shop for the better — and there are valuable lessons we should all learn from this period of disruption.
Over the years we’ve grown accustomed to easy access to a huge variety of food. We’re not typically too concerned with where it comes from, and are largely unaware of the impact that our food choices have on the world.
If we have food in the cupboards but fancy something else, we pop to the shop and buy it. If our food is past its “best before date”, we often throw it away even if it’s still safe to eat. We know we can easily get whatever we want.
Or we did. But Covid-19 changed that.
When lockdown began, our access to food was reduced. Since March, we’ve all grown a little bit more aware of what’s on the shelves, and how important it is. With this, many of us have changed how we shop, and reconsidered what we value when it comes to food.
Frequent and ad-hoc trips to the supermarket have been replaced by larger weekly shops. We’ve had to plan our cupboards more thoughtfully, ensuring that we know what we have and use what we’ve got. We focus on what we really need from a shop, not just what we’d like on a whim.
But gaps on the shelves matter. Seeing items disappear, with shops unable to restock quickly (flour and pasta both come to mind), has made us think harder about where our food comes from.
According to some estimates, Britain imports as much as 80 per cent of our food from abroad. While the efforts of supermarkets to respond to shortages has been impressive, it’s not surprising that when demand soars, we’ve not been able to instantly ship more food in.
As big supply chains have failed, many Brits have started looking closer to home. We’ve reacquainted ourselves with local producers, whose food travels shorter distances to reach us, meaning reduced environmental impact from transportation.
And when we’ve not been able to get what we want, we’ve become inventive. Many of us have improved our diets by taking up home cooking, so that we’re fully aware of what goes into our bodies.
Finally, we’ve begun to see our food system as one that has a social responsibility element. Millions of people looked to supermarkets to help keep us safe in ways we’d never considered before. Those who keep us fed have had to consider how they keep us — and themselves — healthy.
These aren’t changes that we’d expect in any other circumstances. But the total lifestyle and societal shift has made us more considerate shoppers, and that’s an approach we shouldn’t discard just because lockdown is starting to be eased.
As we begin to chart a way out of the pandemic, we want people to embrace the changes they’ve made during this time — but for entirely positive reasons.
Main image credit: Getty