This blog was ‘inspired’ by my ‘study’ of other residents. The rudest woman here is always first in the dining room. She pushes past people struggling with zimmer frames. It is pointless, as we are served a table at a time, so she won’t be first or get more. She carries a giant handbag, presumably as a weapon. The other evening, inefficiency, there was one salt cellar for a table of 10. We were asked to share it. Madame had to be nearly forced to part with it, and asked for it to be given back straight away, for her ice cream?

This attitude is paramount whenever there is a shortage; strikes, weather damage, wars of course, and it came to a head with Covid. Supermarket shelves were emptied (the French pre-empted it from the start). I knew of people who stocked more than they could eat before sell-by date. A man here stocked up on rice and pasta which he never touches. Charity concerns had to move in to make sure people who were housebound, or had no car to chase round the supermarkets, could actually be fed.

But there is a serious background to stocking food, the human and animal deep-rooted need to survive. I was told by a doctor that if anybody had actually reached the point that they thought they would die of hunger, for the rest of their lives they would make sure they had stocks, like a hamster with his pouches or a squirrel hiding nuts.

The horrendous pictures of concentration camp victims are the most arresting ones of starved people. I met a man who was in Changi jail in Singapore – he said there was an absolute scrimmage to catch rats to add to their awful diet. My neighbours here in France amazed me. They were young adults in the war; food was seriously short, near to starving, in occupied and ‘free’ France. As the war worsened, and Germans were hungry as well, they took all the food first. These neighbours had two kitchens, in case they had to move downstairs. All cupboards, at both levels, were stuffed with food, although, like me, they were in the middle of the town with a supermarket down the road. In ‘Gone with the Wind’ Scarlett O’Hara, scrabbling for roots in the wreckage of her estate after the Civil War swore that she would never be hungry again.

I often think of ‘running out’ but cupboard always half empty. On journeys alone I think where and when I will eat, but it is more logistics than worrying about starving. I know I nearly died as a baby before a baby powder was found I could digest (this was 1935). But I don’t believe that could have set up a life-long worry about food. I think you would have to have been aware that you were starving to set that tape running in your head. Do you have any ‘phobias’, fire, locking the door, manic shopping before a bank holiday?  

The Gardener

A Moodscope member