Stop the Bread and Milk Buying Madness!

Buying Bread and Milk is All in Your Head!

I'm writing this with three of an expected six inches of snow piling up on the ground outside my office window. 

Forty-five years past and a few hundred miles north from where I now sit, this would have been considered an average snowfall on an average winter day. It might have slowed us down a bit as we brushed and scraped it off our cars and from our paths, but life would have gone on largely unaffected. 

Located as I am now along the 36^th parallel, it is cause for widespread panic. Not as widespread, perhaps, as it was a few years ago when I lived even deeper in the Deep South. There an inch or two of snow caused a reaction that bordered on insanity. Schools closed days in advance and virtual martial law-like scenarios were implemented. Once a “state of emergency” was declared, you were subject to arrest and fine if you were found frivolously driving around town on one or two inches of snow. Yes, I'm serious. My mind still reels when I recall the time “snow” – i.e. one to three inches – was predicted on a Monday evening, scheduled to arrive on Thursday morning. They started closing the schools on TUESDAY! The city spent Wednesday in full panic mode and when Thursday arrived, it just rained. And there wasn't a loaf of bread or a half-pint of milk to be found anywhere within a hundred-mile radius.

Which brings me to my point: Why? What in the name of rational thinking are people going to do with all that bread and milk?

When I was a broadcaster, I used to joke that whenever the local Kroger or Piggly Wiggly had a surplus of bread or milk, they would call the radio and TV stations and ask us to say “snow” on the air. Didn't matter if it was the middle of July. That simple four-letter word would have the power to strip the shelves of any and all stock and overstock. In the South, it's a Pavlovian response. You hear the word “snow” and you are compelled to run to the nearest grocery or convenience store and buy all the bread and milk there is to be had.

Hey, even native Southerners laugh at it. But nine out of ten of them still do it, even though they can't explain for the life of them why they do it. It is literally a conditioned response, handed down through the generations. It doesn't have to make sense. It's just what you do.

After years of head-scratching, I decided to do a little research on the phenomenon. Here's what a psycho-doodler I read posited as a theory. According to this learned individual, buying bread and milk represents a form of control. The theory goes that when a storm threatens, if you buy something substantial and sensible, like canned food or dried beans or something, you are expecting the worst and surrendering your control of the situation. If, on the other hand, you buy something totally impractical, like bread and milk, you are secretly telling yourself that everything will be alright and that you will remain in control of your circumstances for the short term. There. All figured out. See? Wasn't that easy? The binge buying of bread and milk is all in your head. The crisis isn't real and with a little therapy you could be cured.

Now, I do have to question this scholar's credibility a bit because, A.) she lives in Los Angeles where nary a flake of snow has ever fallen and B.) rather than objectify Southerners in specific, she chose to include Mid-westerners in her proposition. As one who spent the first twenty or so years of his life in the Upper Midwest, I can assure you that at no time did I ever see my mother, father, grandparents, aunts, uncles, friends or neighbors rush off to pillage a supermarket at the drop of a snowflake. Had they done so, they might as well have just taken up residence in the store's stock room, because when and where I was a kid it started snowing at Halloween and didn't stop until Easter.

I read several other psychological evaluations that all centered on people's desire to "meet basic needs" in case of an emergency. Okay. Whatever. If an inch of snow in an area where winter's worse temperatures barely touch the freezing mark for more than a few hours at a time constitutes an "emergency," so be it.

I read one brainiac who suggested that the whole "bread and milk" thing didn't start in the South at all but was a New England phenomenon that began after the Great Blizzard of 1978 when people were trapped in their homes for weeks following the fierce, paralyzing storm. Okay. I remember that storm. In fact, it was the impetus for moving my frozen Midwestern butt south of the Mason-Dixon line the following year. But I also remember that my sister had already been living in the South for nearly a decade by then and was completely mystified by the lack of bread and milk in stores every time a snowflake fell. And besides, right after I read that article I saw another one that said the whole rigmarole started after a big storm in 1950. Which would be given the lie by people I've talked to who recall empty store shelves prior to snows several years earlier than that.

A friend of mine, a woman with no vaunted psychological background and no letters after her name, theorizes that the tradition started back in the days when bread and milk were delivered to the home by route deliverymen. Obviously even a smattering of snow had the potential to disrupt these vital deliveries, so people took things into their own hands and hit the stores ahead of potential bad weather to insure their supply of essentials. And even though I personally have not seen hide nor hair of a milkman in more than a half-century, the thought process is that people stockpile today simply because that's the way ma and pa and the grandparents all did it.

Not that I'm saying a little preparation is a bad thing. But, for Pete's sake, use some common sense. In the first place, you're in the South, okay? IF.....and that's a big “if”.......any measurable snow actually materializes after the weather guessers spend a week scaring the beejeebers out of you, how long will it actually last? A day? Two? You're in Burlington, North Carolina, you know, not Burlington, Vermont. And then what do you do with all that bread and milk? Get together with your equally overstocked neighbors and have the world's biggest bread pudding party?

Which further leads me to ask, why do you have to buy all the bread and milk in sight? I mean, come on. Jesus fed the multitudes with five loaves of bread and a couple of fish. Is there a reason a family of four needs sixteen gallons of milk and thirty-two loaves of bread to last for the next day or two? As I write this in January, there are people in New England who will likely not see the ground again until July. Surely folks in Atlanta, Birmingham, Charlotte, and Charleston can survive on what's in the pantry for a couple of days without having to denude the store shelves of superfluous goods.

Yes, I said superfluous goods. Bread and milk are rotten choices for emergency provisions. Milk requires refrigeration which requires electricity. Unless, of course, you plan to stick it all out in the snow. And nutritionally speaking, you're not getting much bang for your buck out of loaves of gummy, store-bought white bread. What's on your emergency menu, bread sandwiches? Why don't you raid the peanut butter aisle while you're at it. At least that way you'd have something nutritious and non-perishable on which to survive for those grueling thirty-six hours of snowy captivity. And instead of gallons and gallons of liquid moo juice, why not fill up the old pickup truck bed with cases of powdered milk? Yeah, I know it tastes lousy but it's non-perishable and it will still be good when the next two-inch blizzard strikes a couple of years from now.

I know you just want to panic when the power goes out and takes the electric stove with it, but do you realize how easy it is to cook up a pot of Campbell's soup over a can of Sterno? Why not grab some of those instead of all that bread and milk? Or canned fruit. Or packaged nuts. Or granola bars, for cryin' out loud. Something you can actually live on for a day or two. I saw a picture online of some guys lining up with beer and chips. Great idea if you like warm beer. No power, remember? Again, I guess you could just slip some Buds into a snowbank, but really........

Old habits die hard, and that's really all it is. There's no logical reason whatsoever for terrorizing grocery store clerks and herniating bread and milk deliverymen other than the fact that your mama did it and your grandmama did it and your great-grandmama did it, and so on. Don't you think it's time to break the cycle? Get therapy if you need to, but stop the bread and milk madness!

I gotta go now. My wife just got home with groceries......including a rare and priceless gallon of milk......and I've got to put a loaf of bread in the oven.