AIBU to ask family to bring their own food?

[borntobequiet]

I have family visiting for Easter. I know they have been "forward purchasing" in case of shortages caused by any no-deal Brexit, as have I. Would I be unreasonable to ask then to bring their own food to avoid depleting my store? The children will eat up all my pasta and pesto in next to no time. And I don't want to waste freezer space on fish fingers, which I never eat.

Should have said banks’ estimates of a no deal generally range between 10% to 25%, though one has over 50% as an outlier.

Can't be bothered checking date for Easter but it must be after Brexit date. Will you not know if there is a shortage by then. Hope your guests aren't travelling to you as there may not be fuel to drive or bus or train either if Brexit is as bad as being predicted.

God, no. That would be bonkers.

All this Brexit bull is getting boring! Surely people realise that stockpiling food and medication could actually cause the shortage? Theres plenty of bigger things to worry about and i seriously doubt there’ll be a poblem. The scaremongering media makes out like we’ll be forced to loot shops and eat our family 🙄

Oh and if its in the Sun it must be true...

Surely people realise that stockpiling food and medication could actually cause the shortage?

How? Just for once, I want someone to explain how building up a ladder over weeks/months, causes a shortage!

The stockpiling people are doing now is evidently not causing shortages. The panic buying that would result from a no deal and customs problems will. I really don't get what people don't get about that.

Fwiw, I don't think you need to worry about Easter, Born. It's fairly clear that whatever happens we are now unlikely to be leaving on 29th March. Even May getting her deal through on 12th May would require a technical extension.

However, Bluntness, just because we get an extension, doesn't mean no deal is off the table. If we get an extension for a couple of months, don't take part in the EU elections and carry on farting about not making decisions and getting a deal through, then we are properly fucked. The proper cliff edge would be 1st July in that scenario. I haven't seen anything to indicate that is off the table yet.

What I buy now is replaced on the shelves by tomorrow's delivery, certainly within a couple of days.

Stockpiling causes shortages if lots of people do it. If a shop suddenly sells twice as much sugar/baked beans/avocados as they usually do they have to restock with twice what they have previously needed. They will have supplies in warehouses but will be going through them faster than usual. They will ask suppliers to send more but some products will be difficult to suddenly up production. If the shop then has a space on their shelves while they wait for the next delivery shoppers see it and think "I'd better buy sugar/baked beans/avocados whenever I can because they are in short supply". And we carry on buying more and stockpiling. A classic case of "But what would happen if everybody did it?.

Buy some value pasta. Spaghetti is 20pish. Bag of penne is 35p ish. Pesto can be easily made from other things (see a girl called jack/cooking on a bootstrap website). Or make home made tomato sauce. 29p tin of chopped tomatoes, onions fried in a bit of oil, garlic, mixed herns, pinch of sugar and salt. 50pish.

Thanks for mentioning Jack Monroe. She’s been recommending stockpiling since November and has a good list:
cookingonabootstrap.com/2018/11/15/stockpiling-for-brexit/

Happily the Sun is capable of reading the information on the Paddy Power website and accurately reporting it:
www.paddypower.com/politics/uk-brexit
(Odds may change over time.)

This Parliament is perfectly capable of screwing up anything.

Exactly. We have a transport minister who gave a ferry contract to a company with no ferries - do you want to rely on him to get food supplies in? We had a minister for DexEu who only just realised the importance of the Dover-Calais crossing (look at a fucking map Dominic ffs). Do you want him negotiating trade deals? We have a PM who seems determined to drive the country of a cliff and an opposition leader who simply won't oppose. The majority of the other MPs just act like rabbits in the headlights.

Given all this, having a few extra tins of beans and some basic ingredients stashed away seems to be the very least anyone can do.

Crabby, the extent to which people are stockpiling had obviously not cause issues like that yet though. We have been adding extra to our shopping since last summer. I think we would probably last 4-6 weeks now without needing to enter a supermarket, but I haven't bought all of that in one go, and now it's just a matter of keeping up with rotating it.

And I really don't get how anyone can follow the news and this completely incompetent shower of a government and not think that taking matters into their own hands a bit isn't sensible, if they've got the means and the wherewithal.

I saw something last week on Twitter along the lines that America is pretending it has a national crisis when they don't, whereas we are pretending we don't have a national crisis when we do!

This thread confirms my thesis that there are no undecided lurkers left. In fact, there are no actual readers of the thread. Only bestowers of pearls of original wisdom, which is original every time it is posted, because of course nobody else has thought of your particular pearl in over 350 posts - like the "stocking up causes shortages" thing that has been repeatedly discussed.

I agree. It makes me laugh that some of these are considered by the posters to be ground breaking rather than boring old shit that is easily dismissed with evidence.
I have been trying to pop on to threads to dismiss them patiently but, I suspect you are right, there are few undecided lurkers left who need a gentle nudge of reason and common sense.

I checked all of my food packaging the other day and most of it was grown and produced in the UK

And here we go again.

Some detailed breakdown of where our food comes from, very easy to understand:
www.gov.uk/government/publications/food-statistics-pocketbook-2017/food-statistics-in-your-pocket-2017-global-and-uk-supply
Paras 3.4 and 3.8 very relevant
Can the UK feed itself after Brexit? Probably No:
www.countryfile.com/news/can-the-uk-feed-itself-after-brexit/

Excellent link @borntobequiet . I wonder what the beverages stat would look like once we've driven Scotland away!

So where does the actual packaging come from? And when the supply chains get disrupted so everyone is now trying to buy what is left, how long does that last?

My dd often has wonderful grand ideas about little projects she embarks upon. And I'm happy to encourage her. But she has very little idea of what is actually involved in the background to get to a point when she can embark on these projects.

@pinkstripeycat what foods were those? I ask because a lot of my packets don't say where they are made. For a brief example though: tea and coffee are not grown in the uk (except tea in Cornwall which is extremely expensive and not enough to supply the uk), and toilet tissue is made from wood pulp from Sweden. It's made here but the raw ingredients come from the EU. Cocoa is not grown here. Most of Cadbury's chocolate is produced in Poland and imported.

I don't drink coffee but we go through a lot of tea, loo roll and chocolate. All made outside the uk and imported via or from the EU.

Fruit and veg. 80% of soft fruits come from outside the UK, most from the EU.

Overall we grow 50% of our food here. So what about the other 50%??