Is Everyone in Shanghai Starving to Death?
The highs and lows of a prison-level lockdown
I’ve gained the suspicion over the past week that Shanghai is becoming more heavily featured in the news back in my native Australia, judging by the amount of people coming out of the woodwork to ask me about it.
Are you eating? Is everyone ready to revolt? Are you coming back to Australia yet? (The answers are yes, kind of, and hell no).
But while the situation is far from deadly, I’ll admit that it’s a fascinating case study on what happens when a full-scale lockdown is enacted and carried out to a, frankly, over-the-top extent.
The biggest casualty of this particular lockdown has been the complete and overnight loss of our regular way of procuring food. Shanghai has had a level of access untouched by any other city in recent years. Local delivery apps can have any type of meal from anywhere in the world delivered to your house in under an hour at a fraction of the cost of cooking it. Because of that, almost no-one here cooks, and almost no-one stores ingredients.
This has caused a food catastrophe as, unlike in 2020, ghost kitchens, supermarkets, and everyday suppliers are all shut-down. This has forced the creation of a system that seemingly sprung from science fiction.
