Storm Jonas: Why a looming blizzard makes us think we can eat all the junk food we want

Milk, bread, eggs, ice-melt: These are the necessities we run out and buy when the forecast calls for a couple of inches of snow. These, we know, are the staples that will get us through any kind of inclement weather.

But when a blizzard threatens to bury us in two feet of powder and make us prisoners in our own luxury studio apartments with only Netflix for company for Godknowshowlong?

Then, it is time to reach for the Cheez-Its. The DiGiorno’s pizza, the one with the cheese-stuffedcrust. Dill pickle-flavored potato chips. As soon, that is, as you’re done standing panicked in the baking aisle, debating the relative merits of the salted caramel brownie mix over the aqua blue cupcake batter.

As Washington DC braced for this weekend’s snow, a last-meal mentality took hold at the grocery store, and now we’re all shopping like 16-year-old boys. Who have taken a few too many hits from a bong.

On Thursday night, a day before the storm was due to pound us with blizzard conditions, American University students Miranda Oliver and Ashley Sillaro were casually wheeling out of the Columbia Heights Target with two six-packs of Blue Moon and hard cider. These were backups, said Oliver, 21, in case the beer she’d bought just a day earlier ran out.

On that trip, she added, “I got like three things of ice cream. And I don’t even really like ice cream.”

“We were going to get an ice-cream cake,” added Sillaro, 20.

Sure thing, Ashley. Treat yo’self.

Across the region, that was the rationale in the grocery aisles. By Wednesday at Whole Foods in Logan Circle, shoppers had made off with all the steak, leaving behind the kale and the other superfoods. Until they returned for them Friday morning, just before the storm was supposed to roll in. At Giant stores, shoppers are raiding the stocks of comfort foods, frozen pizzas and other convenience items, confirmed Jamie Miller, a spokesman for Landover-based Giant Food and its 168 stores.

“I pulled total sales last night to see what our top-selling items were,” said Claudia Crowder, regional grocery coordinator for MOM’s Organic Market’s 14 stores in the region, on Thursday. “It was jerky and chips.”

Bread, she said, was “maybe the fifth or sixth item.”

Shoppers bought whole milk and eggs, too, of course. But then, Crowder said, they filled their carts with kombucha, plantain chips and seaweed snacks, all of which were top-selling items at the chain this week.

Even Crowder, a shopper by trade, couldn’t come up with any nutritional reasoning for what she threw in her cart this week. “I totally felt I was being irrational in my purchases,” she said. “I bought marshmallows, which I haven’t bought in five years! I was like, ‘Well, it’s going to be snowing, and I’m totally going to be shoveling and exerting energy, so I might as well have something really good.’ ”

Consumer behaviour experts have theories about why we respond to an impending weather disturbance by filling our carts with dark chocolate gelato and Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. Storm preparedness — wrapping up everything at the office, getting into your minivan and making a run to the nearest grocery store for batteries — is so psychologically exhausting, that once you’re at the store, anything goes (into your cart).

“Basically, your ability to resist temptations is reduced,” says Ravi Dhar, director of the Center for Customer Insights and professor of psychology at Yale University. “Mental stress can have an effect on the type of food you choose.”

Behaviour experts call this “mental depletion.” The obvious answer becomes Funfetti cake.

Some shoppers, Dhar says, also begin to reward themselves for checking off the necessities, such as batteries and bottled water. This is the “licensing theory” of consumer behavior: You give yourself license to buy whatever. (Maybe this is why all the low-fat frozen dinners lingered on the shelves at Trader Joe’s.)

Says Dhar: “It’s the reward effect, like, ‘I’ve been a good person, and I can buy that ice cream.’ ”

This seems to be what gripped Jillian Combest, 18, a Howard University student we spied in the aisles of Target. After doing the responsible, informed thing and pre-ordering bottled water to pick up in-store, “I bought red velvet Oreos and fruit snacks,” she said. Her eyes wandered for a moment. “Ooh, is that hairspray?”

A few aisles over,, Julie Farkas, 22, a medical assistant, and her roommate Maggie Adams, 22, a teacher, found themselves pondering a shelf of baking supplies. “We needed time-fillers. So we decided to make cookies,” Farkas said. The basics were already covered. “My mom donated toilet paper. That’s all we need: toilet paper and cookies.”

This did not sound like everything they needed, a slightly concerned reporter suggested.

No one flooding the stores at that point was exactly the responsible type, pointed out Adams, as a woman nearby carefully considered the cans of Goya coconut water.

“If you’re really concerned,” Adams said, “you’d have already bought everything you need.”

Copyright: Washington Post