Feast or Famine

Nine months into the coronavirus pandemic: no panic buying and local businesses need our support

Communities around the world have shown their resilience as they cycle in and out of lockdown

The panic buying in the early days is a thing of the past, but local businesses are still struggling to survive

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A man sits with his face mask down outside a closed restaurant in Causeway Bay amid the third wave of coronavirus infections. Photo: Nora Tam

Susan Jung trained as a pastry chef and worked in hotels, restaurants and bakeries in San Francisco, New York and Hong Kong before joining the Post.

Published: 12:15pm, 9 Oct 2020Updated: 12:15pm, 9 Oct 2020

It’s been nine months since the world as we knew it changed; nine months since we were freely able to hug our families, double-kiss our friends, serve our loved ones the choicest morsels in a dish using our own chopsticks, take spontaneous trips out of the country, and eat out whenever and however we wanted, without having to think twice about if our respective governments had any regulations in place limiting the hours a restaurant can open or the number of people who were allowed to be at one table at a time.

Thank goodness the panic buying of the early months has stopped. Have the people who hoarded so much toilet paper that it covered an entire picture window from floor to ceiling finally used it all, or did it moulder in the heat and humidity of a Hong Kong summer?

(The rest of the world laughed at the hoarding in Hong Kong, but then when the pandemic reached their country, they did the same thing.) Are the people who jacked up prices of essentials such as face masks and antiseptic wipes feeling the tiniest bit of remorse for their greed, or are they wallowing in the sands on some pristine beach as they enjoy their profits?

Once hard-to-find ingredients such as bread flour are now back on the shelves; the flour no longer sells out within an hour of being restocked, and shops aren’t limiting us to only two bags at a time.

For a while, it was impossible to find ingredients such as flour and yeast, and panic buyers made things worse. Now people are sharing hard to find ingredients. Photo: Jonathan Wong

Actually, the bread-making community was remarkably helpful to each other, as flour and yeast (the latter often in the form of home-made sourdough starter) were offered by those who had it to those who didn’t.

As in years past, Hong Kong is proving resilient. Businesses close, new businesses open to take their place. With restaurants, many of the new openings were planned well before the coronavirus started, but with others, people decided to start their own businesses during the pandemic because, well, why not?