Lockdown Home Baking Spurs Shortage Of Flour

The Atlantic reports:

Over the past few months, the best place to trace America’s deepening pandemic anxieties has been the shelves of grocery and big-box stores. The first common household goods to disappear were disinfectants: hand sanitizer, Clorox wipes, Lysol. Bottled water and toilet paper were snatched up once companies started advising workers to stay home. Amid these disappearances, one of the most persistent has been that of an extremely common, shelf-stable product that has no obvious link to cleanliness or quarantine at all: flour.

For most other products vaporized by pandemic demand, supplies are bouncing back. Manufacturers are catching up, or the spike is subsiding. But scooping up a bag of flour still often depends on dumb luck, even as packaged bread and other flour-based processed foods remain abundant. It doesn’t take much detective work to figure out where it’s all going: Facebook has been flooded with photos of homemade focaccias, pancakes, and banana breads.

Read the full article.