Another Episode of Food Storage and Learning from History

There are patterns in all aspects of our lives, patterns that repeat with regularity so that we can order our lives.  We know the sun rises in the east every 24 hours.  Spring always follows winter.  Babies gestate for nine months.  Some historians have noted that Earth gets a good pandemic every hundred years or so, and one might note that the COVID-19 pandemic is frequently compared to the influenza pandemic of 1918-1920.

Of course, there are always smaller scale epidemics that occur as well.  Pandemic or epidemic, people throughout history respond the same.  It happened with the yellow fever epidemics earlier in our nation's history, and it happened with the Spanish influenza one hundred years ago.  The vast majority of people are not at all prepared, and when faced with difficulties of the disease spreading around them, they refuse to take precautions.  They can't avoid going out into public because they need to provide for their families.

Daniel Dafoe is most known for his novel Robinson Crusoe.  The following excerpts taken from his Journal of the Plague Year provide a detailed account of the bubonic plague in London, England in 1665, which killed one-quarter of the population.  They sound all too familiar to our circumstances today, except for the astronomical death rate.

"Nothing was more fatal to the inhabitants of this city than the supine negligence of the people themselves, who, during the long notice or warning they had of the visitation, made no provision for it by laying in store of provisions, or of other necessaries, by which they might have lived retired and within their own houses, as I have observed others did, and who were in a great measure preserved by that caution"

".. nor were they, after they were a little hardened to it, so shy of conversing with one another, when actually infected, as they were at first: no, though they knew it.

I acknowledge I was one of those thoughtless ones that had made so little provision that my servants were obliged to go out of doors to buy every trifle by penny and halfpenny, just as before it began, even till my experience showing me the folly, I began to be wiser so late that I had scarce time to store myself sufficient for our common subsistence for a month...

Who went shopping?  Those who were the least prepared.  The poor.

"And here I must observe again, that this necessity of going out of our houses to buy provisions was in a great measure the ruin of the whole city, for the people catched the distemper on these occasions one of another, and even the provisions themselves were often tainted; at least I have great reason to believe so.

However, the poor people could not lay up provisions, and there was a necessity that they must go to market to buy, and others to send servants or their children; and as this was a necessity which renewed itself daily, it brought abundance of unsound people to the markets, and a great many that went thither sound brought death home with them."

All people tried to take precautions, but again, the poor had fewer options. 

"It is true people used all possible precaution. When any one bought a joint of meat in the market they would not take it off the butcher’s hand, but took it off the hooks themselves. On the other hand, the butcher would not touch the money, but have it put into a pot full of vinegar, which he kept for that purpose. The buyer carried always small money to make up any odd sum, that they might take no change. They carried bottles of scents and perfumes in their hands, and all the means that could be used were used, but then the poor could not do even these things, and they went at all hazards."

We live in extremely interesting and challenging times.  COVID-19 is only the beginning.  The global economy is about to crumble.  Locusts are plaguing Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.  Famine is in the cards.  So, likely, is war.  It's not something I or anyone else wishes for.  It's history.  It repeats.  Prepare or perish.

6.1.23