With the government planning on loosening the Lockdown restrictions and me needing a few bits and pieces for cooking for the One25 Fundraiser, I decided to go to Tesco today while it is still comparatively safe to do so. I was quite late getting there as I had to wait in for an Amazon delivery, but I only had to queue for around 20 minutes to get in. Everyone was well behaved, and this time I saw four people wearing masks (out of 100+).
There’s still no flour. Not even rye flour. I’ll cope.
But they did have Welsh Cakes!
The staff in my local shop believe they know the answer to the missing flour mystery. They say it is a combination of: (1) a lot of the packaging for bagged flour comes from China, and so first there was a shortage of packaging, and thus less flour on the shelves; (2) people started panic buying bread, so flour supplies were prioritised to go to the big bakeries like Hovis and Kingsmill, rather than to ‘personal’ home-baking supplies; and (3) the gentleman who told me this is Muslim and as he put it, Ramadan was about to start, so a million people rushed out to buy flour for making samosas and the like.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Big Tesco stores have their own in-store bakeries and it makes sense that they’d prioritise using the flour themselves over selling it to us.