So you stockpiled at the grocery store...

There is a specific way to think about stockpiling that can be a public health benefit. Do hoarding right.

Originally published on Medium.com 19 March 2020

The key thing to understand about the current pandemic, and the social distancing measures that are being rolled out to combat it, is that everything works better when you are thoughtful — it’s the difference between an action being helpful and causing problems. Grocery hoarding is one those things. By now, you have probably seen pictures of empty grocery store shelves. You have definitely heard about frantic searches for toilet paper. You might be reading this from atop a mound of carefully stacked pasta boxes in your living room.

The question to ask yourself about hoarding is, “What, exactly, am I trying to achieve here?” If what you are trying to do is feed yourself, I have great news: the grocery stores are going to stay open, and the American food production and distribution system is still functioning pretty well. There will be a few products that are difficult to find, but there will be food in the stores. Restaurants will still be delivering, too. You should definitely think about best practices for grocery shopping (wash everything, give people space at the store, maybe opt for delivery where possible), but this is not the apocalypse. You are not going to starve to death.

That said, there is a really, really good reason to have a hoard of food: you will need a stash of food in order to properly self-quarantine (“home isolation”) if someone in your family gets sick. To be clear, this is something that you are doing more for everyone else than for yourself. A lot of Covid-19 cases are pretty mild; there is a good chance that getting sick would not prevent you or someone in your home from being able to make a very miserable trip to the grocery store. It certainly will not prevent you from ordering pizza.

But you should not do those things.

The whole thing about Covid-19 is that it is highly, highly contagious. From the moment of infection, it takes somewhere between two days and two weeks to show the symptoms. For at least some of that incubation period, you are already spreading the disease to people with whom you have contact. And this disease is very, very infectious — more so than flu — because of the virus’s apparent ability to remain in the environment for long periods of time.

So if someone in your house gets Covid-19, probably everyone in the house has it, even if they currently seem not to have symptoms. And anyone who goes to the grocery store or goes out to meet the pizza guy is likely to spread the disease on to its next host.

Don’t be a plague engine.

Instead, you need to upgrade from social distancing to self-quarantine: try to the best of your ability to avoid leaving the house and avoid contact with people outside the house until your symptoms have subsided AND until at least seven days have passed without anyone else in the house becoming sick. This is how you snuff the spread of the disease: decide that it ends with you and your household. Now you can thoughtfully return to the hoarding question.

So what are you trying to do with a hoard of groceries? The answer is that you are trying to have enough supplies on hand that you could undertake a two-week or so self-quarantine — one week for you, and one week for all the family members who become symptomatic in a week. It is not a perfect quarantine, but two weeks is a reasonable baseline to plan for, and even those of us living in city apartments can probably find enough storage space for that amount of supplies.

What you should NOT do is to then start consuming that hoard tomorrow, (unless you are already sick). Remember: the grocery stores are open. Restaurants are delivering. If your supplies are being eaten, they will not be available for the quarantine. So given that you need to eat, tack on one more week worth of supplies: think of your kitchen right now as containing 2 weeks of hoard plus 1ish week of working inventory. By confining your shopping trips or deliveries to a once-a-week affair, you are limiting your contact with the community, keeping the store from becoming crowded, and making the logistics of grocery supply and delivery easier for everyone involved while still giving yourself and your family access to fresh fruit and vegetables and consumables, like dairy.

That last part is important. If you are trying to hoard food for a long period, chances are you have gone with a lot of shelf-stable items, like pasta. You can live on a diet of shelf-stable materials for a very long time. But food consumption is not just about physical health and the presence of nutrients; it is about mental health — eating good food makes us feel better and comforts us, and cooking is a good activity for using time productively, if you suddenly have a lot of it. For those of us who like to cook, it also provides the same mental health benefits as any good hobby. And although you can certainly put together the nutritional requirements for your body out of shelf stable items, you are going to feel healthier if you are keeping fresh food in your diet.

This advice also points to how hoarding goes wrong.

We are probably all going to need to maintain social distancing measures for a minimum of 4–6 weeks, and it is possible that we might be doing this for months. In order for that to even be possible, all of us have to think about how to implement these measures in ways that are sustainable over the long-term. Hoarding a month of food at a time, only to repeat the process next month, and subsisting on a diet of shelf-stable foods is not going to work. Even if you manage to make the mechanics work, you are not attending to you and your family’s mental health needs around food, and mental health is what degrades our ability to maintain social distance over time. The stir crazy is real.

So start eyeballing your hoard of food more thoughtfully. If you haven’t built a stash, start trying to accumulate enough food that you could manage a one-week quarantine. Then you can expand to two. If you acquired a one-month stash last weekend, take a deep breath and consider signing up to take a delivery of fresh groceries in a week or two, once things settle down. And think about your diet in terms of mental health, as well as physical health and quarantine. Everything about this situation is frustrating and anxiety inducing, but we can make it work if all of us try to be a little more thoughtful. Just keeping reminding yourself: we’re trying to build a society here.