Brexit: Is it time to stock ’til you drop?

If we can’t agree on a solution to Brexit all we can do is brace ourselves for the worst. As the Government readies the country for food shortages and a new cookbook uses stockpiled goods, Samuel Fishwick joins the preppers
Prepare to bail: Samuel Fishwick with his supplies
Matt Writtle

Walled in with stacks of Fray Bentos Steak & Ale pies, corned beef and baked bean tins, I am arranging a peace-of-mind palace — a tinned-goods fort within which I intend to ride out a no-deal Brexit. It is Friday, the last day of my week-long endeavour to prepare for any event of civil panic and food shortages. Somebody had to come up with a plan.

That somebody wasn’t me. In recent months, hoarding supplies has gone from being the “Prepper” pastime of an eccentric social fringe fearing the end of the world to the thread binding Brexit-wary online communities together. Jack Monroe’s next cookbook, Tin Can Cook, is billed as a post-Brexit apocalyptic cookbook to get us through a worst case scenario with recipes using dry and tinned ingredients. Pre-orders are already high. Meanwhile, on Mumsnet, the parenting website, anxious mothers are trading tips on storing box hair dye and details of World Trade Organisation tariffs on cheese. A Facebook group called the “48% Preppers” is attracting about 100 new members a day (the title a nod to the Remain: Leave vote in the EU referendum). To add to the mood of panic, more than 600 people across Britain have bought a £300 “Brexit Box” since it was launched in December, according to its UK manufacturer, Emergency Food Storage.

Call me crazy but some of this seems sensible — not just because 3,500 regular and reserve forces have been readied for no-deal deployment. Cod psychology (abundant even in the face of punitive post-Brexit fishing quotas) suggests compartmentalising the problems that overwhelm you, shrinking them down, tackling them in bitesize form.

So here I am, taking back control with an £86.17 shopping spree for food that should last me six weeks from March onwards. In an experiment, I set out to consume only British foods, to see what we are in for, but in the end I panicked during my panic buy and stockpiled whatever I could get my hands on, regardless of where it was from. Here’s how I hunkered down.

Is it time to stock up on your favourite tinned goods?
Getty Images/National Geographic

Monday

“Have you seen this?”, says a colleague, flinging a news cutting at me. “Breppers. People preparing for Brexit. They’re a thing.” We think this through. “Wouldn’t you have to change your diet?” I ask. “Cutting out any ingredients or drinks not produced in the UK?” My colleague shrugs. Or possibly shudders. I decide to investigate.

“You’d be surprised by how much isn’t 100 per cent made here,” says Jo Elgarf, the admirable south London mother who helps run the 48% Preppers group (one of her four-year-old twins, Nora, has a rare brain condition called polymicrogyria, and she’s understandably concerned about medical supplies in the event of a no-deal Brexit). “You could have a pork pie made 95 per cent here, but then the gelatin comes from Europe.” Another friend, with a shady contact in the dairy world, warns me that 50 per cent of Britain’s yoghurt is produced outside the UK. It’s an apocryphal apocalypse, but one I am determined to prepare for.

This means making a meal out of breakfast, lunch and dinner. On the Tube I munch solemnly on a Jazz apple, which is farmed in Kent, and gaze lingeringly at a fellow passenger’s Pret-bought pain au raisin. They spot me and feel compelled to get off the train and wait for the next one.

Tuesday

Obviously I’m hungry. And decaffeinated. “Coffee?” asks my desk mate brightly. “Are the beans British?” I ask, earnestly. “I’ll find out,” she says. She doesn’t come back. I spend a morning looking at advice on the 48% Preppers group. Popular essentials: toilet roll, powdered milk, 20p spaghetti bags, nuts, cleaning products. “Amazon is a great place to bulk order,” Elgarf later tells me. “We’re very mainstream. People make us out as very tabloidy but it’s actually very boring. We’ve had proper Preppers join the group and they leave within minutes because they don’t think we’re taking the end of days seriously enough.”

Her chief concerns are eminently practical. “If a hard border goes up, we’re worried about infrastructure being destroyed and lorries being delayed getting through. We’re promoting [the idea that] people get a larder before we Leave. It’s also the time of year when we don’t grow much fresh fruit and veg ourselves.”

My concerns are less practical. Bored with apples, I head to Deeney’s in Leyton, a Scottish diner where I order a haggis sandwich. “Haggis, 100 per cent Scottish lamb. Scottish cheddar. Bread baked in Bermondsey,” reveals co-owner Paddy, bemused. “Rocket grown in Italy. I guess we’ll have to take that out.”

Emboldened, I start asking where more food is produced. It’s hard to gauge if this approach is popular. “Fish from the Atlantic, potatoes from Kent,” says the man serving me fish and chips for one. “Do you have an intolerance?” Something like that, I say.

Fishwick's Brexit food stock pile
Matt Writtle

Wednesday

Theresa May’s deal has been rejected. My stomach is rumbling ominously, like the nation. Yet it’s medicine shortages that panic most people. “I can prep against almost anything,” says Elgarf. “But I can’t prep against Nora’s medicine running out.” Anyone trying to secure more than a month’s medication should, in theory, be flagged.

“Some of my meds have previously come from Germany and I do worry about whether this will affect their availability,” says Amy Simpkins, 25.

“However as I currently receive a set dosage of medication per month on prescription, I’d need to talk to my GP first if I wanted to get more supplies in advance of Brexit occurring.”

Thursday

I decide to stock up, hurtling into a Tesco Extra with a Brexiteer’s hunger to go out into the world and make a success of it.

Fray Bentos, trusted “since 1888”, seems reassuringly indestructible. I buy 10 of their tinned pies. Powdered milk, three-kilo bags of fusilli pasta, 20 cans of tuna, Danish ham and an absurd volume of tinned macaroni cheese are piled into the shopping cart.

“Are you sure about those?” a voice by my elbow says as I eye up 30 25p cans of beans. A polite stranger looks up, worried. “They’re completely flavourless,” she says.

I explain what I’m doing. “I lived through the miners’ strike and the poll- tax riots but I’ve never seen people go this mad,” she says to no one, shaking her head. I head home.

Friday

In the cold light of morning, surveying my trolleyload of folly, several things strike me. I don’t own a tin-opener. We don’t have the space to store everything (or more accurately, anything). And I forgot the cat food. The cat eyes me, hungrily.

I’ve been swept up in a wave of Brexit gastropolitics, cakes eaten and not eaten, pangs indulged. Dismantling my fort, I cart it off to a food bank, where it’s actually needed.

Who knows what Brexit will bring? Needless to say, some people won’t have the luxury of prepping for it.

The post-brexit shopping outlook

  • Half of the food we consume in the UK comes from abroad. 
  • Around 85 per cent of the vegetables we import come from the EU, with Holland providing the bulk of the UK’s tomatoes and onions, Spain most cauliflower and celery, and France leading potato supplies.
  • The UK imports a third of its CO2 needs. The gas is vital to the meat, chicken and beer industries. CO2 is used in the guns used to kill animals, as well as providing the fizz in carbonated drinks and being crucial to propelling beer from bar pumps.
  • At 16 per cent, the UK has the second-largest dairy trade deficit in the world, so it relies on imports. Of the UK’s dairy imports, 98 per cent are of EU origin.
  • The UK imports 60 per cent of its pork. Denmark provides 26 per cent, Germany 18 per cent, Holland 15 per cent, Belgium 10 per cent.

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