Prior to the pandemic, I made an event of a grocery run for me and a child (or two, or three). Our local grocery had a selection of free cookies and strong coffee, and the boys would indulge in the former while I indulged in the latter. They liked selecting the cereals, or granola bar flavors, or cake mixes. They animatedly “drove” the race car shopping cart and, in one particularly disgusting moment, discovered some kind of partially consumed beefstick in the cab of the vehicle and… you know, finished the job. (Before you wonder what I was doing that I didn’t intercept that activity, I refer you to an entire post devoted to Steve the Wine Guy & other members of our grocery’s cast of characters).

When COVID hit, not only were we no longer comfortable having the boys join me in the store, but we wanted to minimize total time spent of exposure overall. I therefore planned for 2 weeks of meals at a time — breakfasts, lunches, dinners, and snacks without any additional care to help prepare in our snippets of time between parenting and work — for our family of 5. What did this practically mean?

1. I suppressed minor panic attacks when I would arrive to empty shelves of items featured on my list: bread, meat, Spaghettios. I contemplated showing “proof of children” when they rationed things like gallons of milk or packages of chicken.

2. My cart was so full — so comically full — that after the first few runs, I deployed a new strategy of checking out and loading up the car after the produce + meat + bread sections, then coming right back in and doing another round through the aisles + dairy + frozen section.

3. How does one store all these precisely planned & purchased groceries once they’re finally offloaded in the back hallway? Enter: “the Panic Pantry.” Highly perishable, fresh food was stored per meal plans in the kitchen refrigerator and pantry. The basement’s Panic Pantry was where I stashed less perishable foods, staples we’d dip into in a pinch, even bunches of bananas bought while they were still green so that — by the time we consumed all of the fresh fruit we had bought upfront — we still had fresh fruit even starting day 7+. By the time we were on days 11 – 14, we were having meals made of thawed meat, frozen vegetables, and boxed carbs like rice or pasta.

At some point, over a year after everything began, I had to bring a boy with me to the grocery again. We went back to fitting our groceries all in 1 cart as we planned for only 1 week at a time. And we finished our last snacks from the Panic Pantry.

In two years, we never went hungry. We never had any noticeable nutritional deficiencies. I have a lot to be grateful for with respect to how we weathered the pandemic as a family. But I’ll be honest, it breaks my heart a little bit that only J remembers what a big deal those free cookies once were.