John MacDonald: The COVID toilet paper rush was OTT and so is this

I’ve got a story which has Covid-19 toilet paper mania written all over it.  I was blown away talking to someone in Christchurch at the weekend who said they’d been out and bought a whole lot of extra food because of the fuel situation with everything going on in the Middle East.  This is not something I endorse and it certainly isn’t something I'll be doing. But maybe the fact that they are British has something to do with it.  Because they were saying that they remembered the time when Britain invaded Iraq and the government telling people then to stockpile.  They said they were told they should have a month’s worth of non-perishable food in the cupboards. And that’s what they did.  So, as soon as they started hearing about fuel tanks in New Zealand running dry over the weekend, they shot out to the supermarket and stocked up.  They told me they’d been thinking about the potential consequences if we get to the point where the 50-days' supply the government keeps talking about starts to get a bit low on it.  What if the farmers start getting rationed? What about food production lines that need fuel? Not to mention fuel for the trucks that deliver food supplies around the country.  For a very brief second, I started thinking that they might have a point.  But it was a very brief second.  They also said they thought we should be rationing fuel now, instead of waiting until there’s a problem on the horizon.  That, if a fuel shortage does happen, it’s going to be all the other things that we rely on fuel for that are going to be affected.  But you’re not going to see me at Pak n Save filling the trolley up - just in case.  Because if everyone did that then we really would have shortages on our hands.  Just like there was no need for the rush on toilet paper during covid, there is no reason for us to be stockpiling food now.  LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.