Haha, the first thing I did when I got to my apartment in Canada was buy a 10 or 20 kg bag of flour.
You can eat pretty well off onions, carrots, turnips, potatoes, rice, beans, and beets. Also ground horse meat was super cheap for some reason in Montreal, and actually really good. I think I was in the 2-5$ range per meal.
Over here pandemic survival was pretty straightforward. The country was covid-free about a year into the pandemic, but you couldn't enter or leave the country, and there was mandatory free testing. Positive? Off to military quarantine for you. Not fun, but you're fed pretty well and receive free medical care if needed. Then once Covid finally arrived, we had 2 months of don't-leave-home-for-any-reason (you could order food online), followed by a free vaccination campaign. Covid became irrelevant shortly after that. While I'm saddened that it was hard on other people, it was a very pleasant 2 months of quiet study and remote work for me.
So we didn't quite skip covid, but we nearly did. If we were on the priority list for vaccines (e.g. a rich country), we might have done it!
I would say the biggest effect of Covid was we began to question our assumption that America is some sort of well-organized paradise. People here still have a pretty high opinion of the USA, but it really got knocked down a peg that year. People still have a positive opinion of Canada, at least until they try to get a visitor visa... that process has been an embarrassing mess for 5+ years, even without the recent hiccup!