Hallelujah!

I held off buying flour online for any number of reasons. I do prefer to use a local store even if flour isn't a local product. But it has been five weeks since I have seen all purpose wheat flour of any kind at my local grocery store. I had about half of a five pound bag of King Arthur all purpose flour when people started to be nuts. I found a 5 pound bag of Gold Medal bread flour and a 1 pound bag of King Arthur organic all purpose flour that was clearly out of date when I purchased it.

That was five weeks ago and even though my husband and I don't bake that much every small particle of flour began to seem precious. Finally last week, the fifth week of there being no wheat flour at all at the store, I searched online for all purpose flour. Even that was an issue. Lots of sellers wanted to sell 50 pound bags but smaller amounts seemed to be non-existent. I don't know the algorithm for Amazon's search engine but I guess I always assumed that it worked on the "next best guess" idea. But everything was in much larger amounts than I wanted (I feared storing 50 pounds without insect predation), so I kept clicking through until I found a ten pound container of Gold Medal all-purpose flour. Six weeks after I stopped finding flour at the store I got a ten pound bucket of flour on my doorstep.

I understand that I am not the only one in the world who wants flour but having it disappear completely from my local grocery store for five weeks is unheard of. I haven't seen toilet paper or paper towels for five weeks either. If people stocked up on tp early on in this crisis, they might be running out now but even that seems unlikely.

I studied philosophy as an undergraduate so the whole utilitarian idea is quite familiar to me but knowing about what happened subsequent to Hegel and Bentham and John Stuart Mill should put a pause in anyone's consideration of "the greatest good for the greatest number". It prodded all sorts of authoritarian and fascistic governance and even in modern times the lieutenant governor of Texas is encouraging senior citizens like me to sacrifice ourselves so that his grandchildren can have a better life. I want him to inject Lysol or Chlorox in his veins to test Trump's ridiculous statements on Thursday so that his grandchildren can live without a moron for guidance.

It sounds petty and juvenile but my husband and I were so delighted that we finally had flour that he made his very first batch of brownies.