Wartime families knew how to make do with less – plenty of people today could stand to learn something from them

Stockpiling and eating carb-rich foods without exercise will only leave us with more problems, writes Janet Street-Porter

A shopper passes empty shelves at a supermarket in London (EPA)

At times like this I wish my mother was still alive. Anyone who has lived through rationing and a war will be coping better than the rest of us with the prospect of limited movement, a restricted diet and increased personal responsibility.

On the beach in Kent this week, the only people taking brisk walks and keeping a distance were the fit over-70s, the group Boris Johnson seems so keen to place under house arrest.

This crisis has seen an upsurge in selfish behaviour, with a large number of young and middle-aged men in the early morning queues at large supermarkets. Sure, some might be shopping for elderly relatives, but not all. My friend’s daughter is eight months pregnant and queued for fresh fruit and veg, only to be shoved out of the way by these idiots when the doors opened.

Some pensioners are slower on their feet, so expecting them to get up at dawn and run around grabbing essentials in this modern version of Supermarket Sweep is a non-starter.

Two weeks ago I wrote: “Why not bring back rationing? Not just of food, but toilet rolls, cleaning products, and junk food. It could deal with obesity by nudging the population towards a healthier diet, as well as curbing panic buying and preventing food riots over cans of pilchards or frozen chocolate cakes.”

Now is the time to bring it on. Shopping has become an expression of our deep-seated fears. Fear of starvation? Fear that the smallest change to our normal diets will lead to madness? Enter any food retailer and you feel the mood – sheer panic – prevails.

Folk who have never baked a loaf in their lives have grabbed every bag of strong white flour throughout the land, leaving a paltry few bags of dark rye behind. At farm shops, middle-aged men are dragging massive bags of potatoes to their cars. God forbid they won’t have access to a chip over the coming weeks. Sausages are like gold dust. The only pasta left on the shelves at my nearest gourmet food store was coloured black with squid ink – it appears even carb addicts can’t cope with that option. Trolleys laden with 10 sliced loaves, enough wine for a year.

Maybe we have watched too many reality television shows where Bear Grylls and his peers live in remote environments on berries and drink their own wee. Survival shows where celebrities sit around and whinge about their diet of beans and rice with no salt or sugar. These feats of “endurance” are one of our favourite forms of relaxation, where we slump on the sofa with a bucket of trash to munch, enjoying the ritual humiliation of people starving for large wads of cash. I’m a Celebrity... is a modern gladiatorial sport, but that doesn’t mean viewers are willing to adopt a diet of pulses and forgo booze. Where’s our cash for suffering a shortage?

Plucky Brits made do during the war, but modern citizens can’t entertain the notion of any kind of restriction. Sod living on simple food and leftovers, a full diet of exotic fruit, fresh ripe avocados, celebrity chef sauces and every kind of pasta shape drenched in tinned tomatoes is the very least we can contemplate if we are condemned to our homes. Will we starve without a freezer full of mini Magnums, a ton of frozen peas and dozens of ready meals?

In wartime, people made bread from potatoes and fake mince from turnips. Sugar was rationed, consequently people were thin. That’s not going to happen in 2020. Nigella might be telling us how restorative it is to bake every day – but who eats all those carbs and stays svelte? Even if I wanted to bake, where do I source the flour? Pasta, bread, cakes, spuds and pizza are the food of fear.

Fear that we are having our last meal before lockdown or potential illness. Fear our lives will be changed permanently and we will never return to work. Turn on the telly and doom-laden bulletins bring us down even further, and catastrophising breeds further anxiety on social media as fake news and false cures proliferate. Footage of makeshift mortuaries in central London adds to the sense of doom while Johnson looks wild-eyed and only just in control. No wonder we’re eating a baked potato followed by a huge bar of milk chocolate.

We were a nation of overeaters before the virus struck, and we will emerge from three months of isolation even fatter, with lardy arses and big rolls around our waists. The government’s five-a-day veg plan has gone right out of the window and into the recycling bin. When we feel anxious and under threat, we turn to stodge. If we can’t hug a partner or even the dog, we can shove down a Marks and Spencer luxury hot cross bun – that’s if there are any left on the shelves.

Clean eating has slid off the agenda – extolling the delights of steamed cabbage and nuts seems far less comforting than toad in the hole or fishcakes.

What we eat over the coming weeks will be critical, not just for our physical health, but our mental health too. Cooking from scratch every day is very rewarding, it reduces anxiety and focuses us away from negative thoughts. The trick will be balancing the pleasures of cooking – now that we will have time to try new dishes – with the undeniable pleasure of eating familiar, stodgy comfort food against what an idle body actually requires.

With so many other restrictions in place, is it time to start a diet or change our eating habits? Not really. The trick will be to take more exercise, and also (if we are healthy) to keep walking for as long as we can.