#julichris

Even New York has Krispy Kreme (although only a handful around). Heck, the closest donuts to me are Tim Horton's (at the Amoco gas station).

I am so jealous of your Timmy’s, although I hear they’ve gone downhill since being bought out. We do HAVE Krispy Kremes around, I’ve just never seen ‘em and thought they were all in the burbs. Turns out there’s one downtown, however, so I may jaunt out today after my staff meeting to see about procuring a pastry. 

pidgeling

I appreciate that somewhere in us there apparently lies a panic-bread baking gene left unnoticed until now, going by the consistent lack of yeast in all supermarkets

julichris

The gene might be German- my supermarket staggered putting yeast out throughout the day so everybody had a chance to get it. Later they started selling it in way bigger packaging than usual. Flour, too

I think of it more as a general Bread Panic gene; bread is our staff of life and we want to make sure we always have access. It’s why people buy milk, eggs, and bread before a hurricane, after all, and I think a lot of people went “Well, if I can’t go shopping for weeks on end what’s going to get eaten/go bad before then?” and decided they’d better be able to produce their own bread. You can do without eggs and you can freeze milk or buy it powdered, but especially in the US we....we have a strong relationship to baked goods. And powdered bread is, well, yeast and flour. (You can freeze bread, but it takes up a lot of space.)

spiderine

Have you ever read "Stand on Zanzibar" by John Brunner? Actually, "The Sheep Look Up" is more relevant in this case. Either way, you might want to take a look at the structure of those two books. They use a conceit similar to what it seems you may be thinking of. They are also *brilliant* and funny (if dated) looks at overpopulation and endemic disease, respectively. I highly recommend them.

They’re dystopian/post-apocalypse so they’re unfortunately a hard no for actual reading for me, but I did read the summaries and the structure does sound similar to what I’m trying to do. At least for the introduction, which is a sort of fractured collage of early quarantine -- it’s a lot of headlines, emails, and fragments of conversation. 

Stephen King did a similar thing with Carrie, too, and to a lesser extent in many of his other books, where he’ll occasionally throw in a news or police report or a description of a television/radio show -- I was thinking of how he showed the end of American society in The Stand, mainly with newspaper/handbill quotes and transcripts of military communication and radio broadcasts.