And flour. Had to put my sourdough starter in cryosleep.
There also is no flour. Mmm, I mean « normal » flour.
Was in Tesco yesterday for the (now) weekly shop visit and they were putting bags and bags of flour.
But only self raising and plain ones. I wonder if the producers of the flour do this on purpose (those flours are way more expensive than basic ones)
So there's flour - it's just not in your distribution chain.
Canned Tomatoes, 2.5 kg cans available. 500g cans: out.
Pasta, 500g Spaghetti? Forget it. 5kg bulk: Available.
Yeast, regular cubes: no way. Ordering half a kilo of dry yeast: no problem.
It's just that as a regular normal family, 500g of yeast will get you through a year or two, depending on how much you bake (that's about the equivalent of 75 packets of dry yeast) But that stuff is also impossible to repackage into smaller quantities without exposing it to spoilage. There's a few supermarkets in Berlin that sell unpackaged stuff (basically you bring your own reusable container and they fill it for you) and they're well stocked in flour, pasta and stuff since they solve the repackaging issue at the point of sale.
Same question regarding all the food normally sold to restaurants and companies that are now closed.
Repacking is entirely infeasible for a lot of products - re-canning 2.5kg of canned tomato concentrate is a bit of a mess.
So supply chains will adapt, but that takes time. Some things may be out of stock for a while - I would not expect any substantial quantities of italian brand pasta to show up on the German market for quite a bit. We’ll probably have to rely on German pasta (different flour, often with egg unlike Italian)
We’ll not starve, but we’ll have to live without some stuff we’ve learned to expect as part of our regular diet.
Flour is out there it's just not making it to the shelves.
Now the ones that did open up to retail customers seem widely sold out of the desirable stuff...
most of it's out of stock as of right now, but they're updating their stock every day. I was able to order a 25 pound bag of flour from them yesterday. Take a look in the morning and you may have some luck.