Do you keep a lot of food in stock at all times?

I can feed an army without going to the shops LOL.

I have 2 fridges, with their freezers, plus 2 other freezers, one of which is an upright 5 draw.

I have frozen seafood, bread, chicken, beef, gluten free bread, pizzas and meat pies. My house sometimes feels like a hotel when my sons and their partners giving us a call on a Friday asking if we are home on Saturday. Or call us Tuesday, Wednesday or whatever day, to ask if they can come for dinner.

Having plenty of food helps me not to stress.

I generally just buy as something is finished but have a stock of staples such as flour and pasta. I usually meal plan, check what we already have and add spare ingredients. However whilst kids were off it's all been a bit more rushed so I have an overflow of stuff. I'm working through it all so we are back to minimum of stuff.

Yes, cupboards & freezer are always full and we could probably go a couple of months without shopping (except milk, fruit, fresh veg like potatoes etc).
Even make our own bread so no immediate worry there although we always have things like bagels and a sliced loaf (or two) in the freezer.
Toiletries are not a problem as we have a good stock of everything we need.

When lockdown hit there were local appeals for groceries, household goods, toiletries etc to help people who were desperate. We were able to provide a few shopping bags of items from our cupboards. It really brought it home how "prepared" we were.
Think I got it from my parents. Having lived through rationing in the 40's & 50's, in later life my Dmum liked to keep the larder & cupboards well stocked.

No, because I can't afford to
However I live alone and as long as my dog is well catered for, it doesn't matter

I reckon I'd be OK for a month at least, although it would be getting boring toward the end and that's assuming that whichever disaster had happened didn't affect the power supply. I keep the big stuff in the dishwasher .

I've always made sure there was plenty of food in (I didn't run out of anything during covid) and while it hadn't occurred to me that it might be related to growing up with only the bare necessities, that probably does come into it. But packing up the kitchen to move house a year or so ago was a nightmare even after a couple of months of trying to whittle it down 😖

I would like to live like your friend OP, being a minimalist, I would love the fridge especially to be down to not much before loading it up again, it’s easier for a good clean plus everything gets used up efficiently. The truth is I live like you do as our youngest has an ED and we go through a ton of food.

I find it hard to understand because I don’t see the advantage in it versus knowing I’m sorted for options for a few days/a week. When I’ve been with people who shop every day it has worked out more time consuming and expensive. But obviously it works for you and there must be reasons why you prefer to do things that way

I'm like your friend. I don't have the space. We meal plan and do a big shop every week. I have one food cupboard and an under counter freezer. I have a full spice rack and a shelf in the fridge door full of the condiments you mention, and the cupboard is full but no, I wasnt prepped for covid, and I'm certainly not prepared for the zombie apocalypse. They can have me

I buy sufficient meat, dairy & fish for the current week, and freeze it. Then I take that day's pork chops etc out of the freezer, put them in the fridge at breakfast time, and they're ready to cook by 6pm. I buy fresh fruit & veg for the week.

I keep store cupboard supplies - tins, flour, oil, dried pasta, rice, couscous all the time. Peas, sweetcorn & spinach in the freezer.

I normally have enough food for the week plus ingredients for maybe one or two more meals.

My cupboards sound the same as yours - always loads of herbs and spices, a few tins of tomatoes, different pastas and rice etc. I don’t like to run too low on those things as we almost always cook from scratch so rely on them being in the cupboard. I wouldn’t say I overdo the surplus though and I don’t get anxious if they run out because I’m never more than a week away from the next food delivery/ Tesco express is not far in an absolute emergency.

My mum always had an almost bare fridge (fresh veggies and fruit for 1-3 days worth and some milk) but our freezer was always STOCKED. Dinner was always veggies with something out the freezer that had been batch cooked. Pasta sauce, chilli, frozen chicken she would cook up, frozen fish ect. That’s what I do now. I have a lot of herbs and spices as well, and always have pasta, dried beans and rice. I live next to the big shop, so fresh produce I get on my way home from work every other day. If you look in the kitchen cupboards and fridge it is pretty empty most of the time, unless it’s batch cooking day (every other Monday). Sometimes if I’m in the shop at the right time and I see some meat discounted I will get that as well like if I see a whole chicken reduced I have that as a treat.

if I couldn’t get to the shops we would be fine for a few weeks eating freezer food to be honest, I think right now if it was a survival situation me and my partner could live off the stuff in the freezer for over a month but we would probably be very hangry.

We always do a menu plan and do a weekly shop based on that. Works really well with very little waste. Plus it's nice having the weeks food planned out.

When we last moved house it took us 8 weeks to EAT what was in the freezer and cupboards, in this house we also have a chest freezer in the garage so I reckon we could manage three months now.

I live on top of a hill so if it snows or the roads heavily freezes in the winter then it's almost impossible to drive up. So I've learnt the hard way to keep extra supplies of our regular items in during winter.

I've always lived rurally. Trips to shop for food were/are typically a weekly thing, and though we can get to a shop whenever we need to, we prefer to stock up so more frequent trips are not necessary.

Having a supply of food that could carry us through a few months, if need be, helps me sleep a little more easily at night. (We'd run out of certain things that need to be bought fresh, but we could easily survive on the non-perishables for a long time.)

Not really. We've got spices and sauces but actual food is really only what we eat. We'd have to live on about 6 fish fingers, some chips, ice cream and gravy granules if we ever got snowed in.

I have a lot of food in. That's mainly because I buy things when they are cheap or reduced and then prepare meals with them and freeze or just freeze the ingredients. My freezer is always nearly full.
But other people do things differently and just plan out a week's meals or buy something on the way home from work.

My fridge is almost empty at the end of a shopping cycle. I don't like to waste food so I meal plan and use almost everything before the next order. My pantry has a reasonable amount of shelf stable stuff. Before the pandemic the pantry was kept with low stock too, but the difficulty getting hold of things in the pandemic has caused me to increase my shelf stable stock.

I have multiples of things we use week in week out, chopped toms, tuna, chickpeas, tinned sweetcorn, beans etc. Things that you don't use the whole package in one go like pasta, rice, ketchup etc we tend to have one on the go and a back up. But pasta and rice I will have a couple of different varieties of each, wild rice, basmati, alborio, penne, linguine and spaghetti. I also have lots of different ingredients to make basic ingredients more exciting spices, condiments, different vinegars, oils etc and basic baking ingredients.

I do an online shop most weeks but sometimes I just need fresh salad ect so will pop somewhere on the way home from work. My cupboards are always full, I buy things that don’t go off when they’re on offer, would never pay full price for coffee for example. I have two freezers which I keep track off and will make a rough meal plan before I shop for the coming week, using what I already have in. If I buy something fresh that doesn’t get used I will freeze it for another time.

@redtrain123 it's a 5 ft single unit width fridge. I have a jar shelf and two of the door shelves dedicated to jars . . .

I don't know how anyone manages not to meal plan! I much prefer to get all of the mental load of "what's for tea" over and done with once a week. Otherwise we would probably have pesto and pasta alternating with burger and chips every night for eternity.

We tend to be empty/near-empty before the following week's shopping is delivered. But: freezer usually has 3-4 meals in, and I have a cupboard with a few kg of pasta, jarred sauce, tinned fish, tinned fruit for emergencies.

Are you me, by any chance? I looked through the cupboards the other day to rearrange them and found umpteen pastas, rice packets, tinned tomatoes, passata, pitta bread, wraps, pesto noodkes. I mean, you name it we have it. Freezer full, fridge overflowing.
I could stock Tescos. 😁