Quick: The weather outside is frightful and the National Weather Service says it’s going to get even worse. You’ve got 24 hours notice. What do you rush to the store to buy?

What leaped immediately to my mind was wine and cookies. But most of us, it turns out, are less frivolous.

In the shopping window of opportunity before the East Coast was smacked this weekend by Winter Storm Jonas, Washington, D.C. residents stripped local stores of staples: bread, milk, and eggs. The reproducibility of this behavior—possibly dating back to the fabled New England Blizzard of 1978—has led to a standing joke that the severity of a storm can be correlated to the public’s craving for French toast.

Milk and bread, as pre-storm