Memories about bread.

I was one of Jesse's latest blog entry and he was talking about how he tends to buy food, if on special in bulk (his latest is 30+ boxes according to the photo, of soft-drink (in the 12 pack boxes) because there was a special at Albertsons for like 5 boxes for $10. At the end of it he made a quip that when zombies attack the world, I will have enough food to last for 2 months.

It got me to thinking. When we where growing up everybody use to tease my mother for buying bread in bulk (and then putting it in the deep freeze). Well she ended up getting the last laugh. In about August 2001, there was some sort of explosion at one of the Gas Power Plants or something in Eastern Victoria which supplied the vast majority of gas to Melbourne. It basically meant no hot water for a month and the entire population of Melbourne being a little bit stinky for several weeks. Of course I managed to take showers at my University at the time (I didn't live on campus, but I manged to do it all the same). I don't remember if it was because the showers where heated from an electrical sourse or where supplied via a Gas Station in Western Victoria (this was when I had classes at Geelong, not Burwood, since Burwood is clearly in Melbourne).

Anyway I degress. Another side-effect of the gas-crisis was we pretty much had a mini-collapse of the baking industry since I gather most bread is baked in gas-fired ovens. Most of the supermarkets like Safeway, Franklins and Coles put a 2-loaf limit on purchases of bread but that didn't stop the bread running out and until they managed to get some supplies flown in from interstate, there was pretty much no bread in the state.

Of course my mother was sitting back smiling because she had a freezer full of bread from buying alot of it in bulk previously. I guess mothers are all knowing or something.

I still hate eating bread that has come out of the freezer of course, but I never teased my mother for stockpiling and deep freezing bread ever again.