As the likelihood of the UK crashing out of the EU with no deal increases, we are being warned to prepare for disrupted supply chains and shortages of food and medicine. (Quite why any country would do this to itself is a question I won’t try to answer here: I suppose the logical consequence of nostalgia for the Blitz is the wilful recreation of wartime conditions and we should perhaps be grateful that so far we know of no plans for the UK to subject itself to aerial bombardment, doubtless partly because we’ve sold all the weapons to Saudi Arabia.)

Those who can afford it are stockpiling, using repeat prescriptions at shorter intervals to accumulate a surplus, checking the country of manufacture of preferred toiletries and cleaning products, stocking up on olive oil and tinned tomatoes and good chocolate and thereby, of course, preparing the rich/poor divide to be even more obvious in the days after Brexit.

I do not want to feast while my neighbours starve. I do not want to internalise, or model to my kids, the idea that private hoarding is the correct response to collective suffering, but that was why I voted to stay in the EU, and why I have been marching and writing letters about it for the last two years. If the collective will is for Brexit, if the people have indeed spoken and they have chosen poverty and sickness and ignorance as matters of principle, I am not sure that I understand my obligations towards the people as I would in the case of war or natural disaster. Some people wanted this, others didn’t. It’s not hard to feel that those of us who didn’t want it might reasonably attempt to save ourselves from the consequences. We have bought a big freezer.

Still, the European produce this household would miss most can’t be stored and depends on exactly the just-in-time supply chains most likely to fail: salads, fruit and vegetables coming mostly from Spain and later in the year from Italy and France. We can’t stockpile lettuce. We could have planted some, but slugs and birds have eaten everything we’ve tried to grow in this garden and anyway the idea of suburban self-sufficiency has always seemed odd to me. Much of the point of urbanisation is that you don’t have to be out there at dawn digging holes and picking snails off things because you’re going to go to work and use your skills to earn money so you can buy food grown by someone doing it on a scale that allows us all to specialise. I like to have a tomato plant or two and it’s always nice to stand under the tree and eat a plum warm from the sun, but I never wanted to be a farmer.

So what should we buy, I kept asking, by which I meant, what scenario are we imagining, what is the setting of the story in which we find ourselves? Is this like the kreppa in Iceland in 2009, when food imports slowed and there wasn’t much fruit and veg, or are we looking towards North Korean-style isolationism? I’ve been teased since Names for the Sea came out for taking smoked paprika and pomegranate molasses to Iceland during the crisis, but the point was exactly that they weren’t necessities, like everyone else we used Icelandic necessities and they were fine, but dining on fish, potatoes and cabbage most nights is more interesting if you can roast your potatoes with paprika and steam your cod with tamarind. So we should probably stock up on spices, though it’s hard even for me to take seriously the prospect of a national shortage of sumac. Obviously we should be more worried about antibiotics (or medical staff, many of whom are EU nationals racing for the exits), but I can’t do anything about those, and that, of course, is the point of stockpiling: not that when the hospitals lose power an extra tub of peanut butter is going to make a difference, but the comforting idea that whatever civil disorder and shortages might happen outside my house, inside we can still have the Somali greens and rice from the Persepolis cookbook and the aubergine with walnuts and pomegranates. (I know that part of the point of the Brexit vote is that it should not be business or even dinner as usual inside the houses of the bourgeoisie. I know that the whole idea is that people like me stop thinking about sumac.) It’s not that I think the loss of ingredients is the most serious problem facing post-Brexit Britain, just that it’s one of few I might be able to mitigate for my own household, at least for a few weeks.

There are deer in the woods, my son says, we should get big knives for gutting them. You’re in the wrong book, I say, I’m not planning for Cormac bloody McCarthy, I was wondering more if we’re thinking dried pulses or parmesan, basics or luxuries. Are we preparing for A Provincial Lady in Wartime or just a return to the 1960s, say the scene in A Summer Birdcage where the cooking of spaghetti with wine in the sauce indicates bohemian sophistication? Little House on the Prairie (in the West Midlands) or Helen Dunmore’s Siege? How long are we planning for, anyway? There’s no happy ending in sight and we can’t store a lifetime of soft fruit.

It’s all silly. Stockpiling is just a performance of the illusion that we can individually save ourselves from communal folly. I’ve been helping out in the local food bank and it’s painfully obvious that cans of beans or even bottles of extra-virgin olive oil are no answer to this country’s problems. We shouldn’t be stocking our new freezer with frozen raspberries and spinach, we should be out on the streets giving everything to make sure nobody’s children need private stashes of food and medicine and water.

Even so, we’ve been out on the streets and will be again but it didn’t help, and come the end of March no moral principle is going to feed the kids. What harm does it do, to store a few bags of frozen veg at home rather than in some supermarket depot?