Hi 

 

Here we are at the end of another week of lockdown 

 

With at least 3 more weeks to go before things might start to relax. That’s the sit rep here in the UK at least. 

 

Over this time many questions have arisen 

 

One of them being “Where’s all the flour?”

 

And “How can there be a pasta shortage?”

 

Well I went in search of answers to those and other pressing questions yesterday and I have answers!

 

Pasta: There is no shortage. The problem is that the production and distribution route for this stuff is very complex. 

 

The flour used comes mainly from Canada where it travels to Italy to be made into all those funky shapes. From there it’s distributed all over the world. 

 

As you can imagine there are a lot of tightly controlled steps in this process. As with flour (which we’ll get to in a moment) The sudden panic buying of pasta when lockdown was introduced caused a few hitches. 

 

It’s just taking a while to get back to normal. If we all stop buying this stuff in bulk things will soon return to normal.

 

Flour: This one surprised me ….

 

Again absolutely no shortage of the stuff - in fact the UK is entirely self sufficient flour wise even with a sudden 168% increase in sales. 

 

The problem here is actually with packaging!

 

Flour is produced according to demand and packaged accordingly.

 

In normal times only a certain amount is packed into 1 or 2kg packs for home consumers.

 

The rest goes into much bigger packs for wholesale - restaurants, bakeries etc 

 

Once more the sudden closing of many of these businesses and the sudden upsurge of domestic purchases has cleared the reserves of suitable packaging

 

And again - normality will soon return 

 

I also found a great link to a BBC information page which has some interesting and reassuring articles about the food situation

 

You can read it here 

 

Have as good a weekend as you can and stay safe 

 

 

Bests