Chapter 73: The Government’s Advice
The breakfast was as lively as usual. Uncle Li had outdone himself again with a wide spread of dishes. Leng Pan looked at all this food and thought of the situation described in the book where people would start to starve as early as a week after the start of the apocalypse because they had not stockpiled supplies.
With many people depending on food delivery and only buying a few things like snacks and instant noodles to eat when they are too hungry and their delivery is late, buying supplies in bulk was left to the elderly.
The older generation had weathered many storms and gained foresight. They tend to buy things that would last them longer. First, because buying in bulk is cheaper than buying a few pieces of anything.
Second, because they had experienced some state of emergencies caused mostly by pandemics, requiring them to stay indoors for long periods of time.
As such, they had developed the habit of buying dry foods such as grains, rice, flour, sugar, and even oil in bulk. Drinking water is also stockpiled and they tend to buy huge buckets to store water and change it every once in a while.
In short, many houses with elderly people wouldn’t have to worry about food for a while. Probably until they got used to the idea of the apocalypse and started to go out and search for supplies.
But even so, soon everyone will realize that whether they had a lot of supplies stockpiled or not, they couldn’t eat as luxuriously as before.
Food had to be limited to make sure that people didn’t starve but not too much to fill them completely. Cooking a spread of dishes like the ones on the table would become a distant memory for many households.
Leng Pan of course didn’t have to worry about that. She had stockpiled enough supplies to last them more than a lifetime. But she still couldn’t let anyone know about it lest they become complacent and start wasting food. She had to let them experience the absence of anything to eat and see how people become cannibals just to survive.