Do we actually need to get two weeks of food in?

I agree with this.
When my children were younger I never really knew if I would be feeding various friends throughout the day. I always had extra bags of pasta etc for the not so rare occasions when we had 8 or more children squeezed round the table. It's a habit I have never changed.
Surely those of us who have children must naturally have extra just in case.

I never understand how people don't naturally have at least 2 weeks of food in we could survive well over a month if we needed to the meals would be a bit random but we wouldn't starve. I don't stockpile but we always just have pasta, tins, cereal, stuff in the freezer I couldn't imagine the cupboards actually being empty

We always have at least two weeks of food in the house. It's a habit from my grandparents and bulk buying for costs.
We generally have large bags of pasta/rice, plenty of tins of various pulses, tinned tomatoes etc and frozen veg. It's fairly easy to throw together a balanced meal.

Through the pandemic we were able to get away with shopping every ~3 weeks. I bought fresh veg with shortish shelf life for week one, root veg and frozen veg for weeks 2 and 3.

We have a 350 mm kitchen cupboard that holds ~100 tins. We buy pasta in 3kg bags and rice in 10kg bags and they live in a 500 mm cupboard with smaller packs of fancier shapes and quick cook varieties of pasta. We have another 350 mm cupboard that is full of various varieties of flour for making our own baked goods, bread and pasta so it all fits within our kitchen.

I have got 7. Yes I have got room for 7 but my garden is not huge

if everyone who has a garden had a couple of waterbutts coming off their downpipes that would give them access to hundreds of litres of water.

Although the problem is that if the power goes out, nobody knows whether it is going to be out for 15 minutes or three weeks.

If the power goes out fill a bath and any jugs etc immediately.

some people use bin bags with absorbent cat litter in to line the loo or a bucketI wouldn't go that far but its an option.

where possible have a waterbutt or rwo to catch rain water. I wouldn't eant to drink it but you can wash with it and flush loos. When we losr water for a week, I tied a bit of cotton cloth over the waterbutt tap to filter it and then put sterilising tablets in the bucket I drew it off into. I could probably hive drunk it after that but I didn't

Nail on the head. Look at covid and other big “shocks”. Shelves/tanks can empty in a couple of hours due to panic buying.

Lots of smaller towns and villages don’t have many or any at all. Butchers and greengrocers are particularly rare. Corner shops are mostly ethnic money launderers who don’t sell fresh fruit, veg nor meat - all tinned/packeted cheap ultra processed crap to make the shop look full of stock. Our village used to have the full range of shops just a decade ago - now we have nothing at all thanks to a huge Tesco 3 miles away. Guess what, our last shop, a small sandwich/pie shop couldn’t stay open during the storm Desmond power cut because the ovens, fridges and freezers don’t work without power, nor did the till, the shop lighting, the internet for card processing, etc. Until you experience the reality, you don’t understand how far reaching are the consequences when something we rely on fails.

We have a lot of staples, but don't have months worth of water. I think dh said he put a few 5 litre jugs in basement though.

To be fair, all I’ve done is bought about 5 of those large 5 litre bottles of water which are in the shed and 6 smaller 2 litre bottles, 3 in the boot of each car.

That also covers hygiene needs. Washing yourself, dishes. Clothes as well after a few days. And you’ll need some kind of toilet arrangement as well.

Yes this is a major problem - not everyone has space.

The intention is presumably if half the population has their own stock, the state will be better able to support those without.

Ideally 4 litres per person per day to cover drinking, coooking, washing and hygiene.

If its only a couple of days then you can use less but if its for an extended period of time then the hygiene aspect becomes increasingly important.

You don't. You could SURVIVE on less. They recommend 2.5 litres as a guide amount as it would allow cover all you need in hot weather for example.

I don’t have enough space to store 100 plus litres of water

I still don’t understand how living on tinned food means you need 2.5 litres of drinking water a day to survive!

I have said this on here before and I will say it again because I really don't think that people understand the reality of what will happen.

After the Tohoku earthquake in Japan, supermarket shelves in Tokyo were decimated the same day. Local stores like 7-11s were completely empty.

Next day, what was left was being rationed and many shelves were completely empty.

This was in a city where people are much more civilised than in the UK.

If you think that in the hours, if not minutes, after a major cyber attack (or worse) on the UK that every supermarket in every town won't be besieged by people who have few supplies at home you are deluded. I can also promise you that many of them won't care how they get their hands on available supplies nor who they have to walk over to do it.

So will everyone else. And many of them won't be particularly forgiving just because you think that something in your trolley belongs to you.

Assuming that the staff haven't alraedy shut the doors and made off with half the stock themselves.

How will you pay if there is no electricity?

There is a good chance that if you currently don’t live in a town or city, you will have at least a couple of days food in reserve anyway.

We could eat fairly well for 10-14 days, possibly longer, without having to visit a shop. Even with the power off.

The scientific figure includes water from food. Hence in normal life, people generally actually drink much less. However, much of that normal day to day water comes from fruit / vegetables. If we are all living on tins, I guess it is thought water from food will drop so the amount of water actually drunk needs to increase.

This. I’m in my 50s and in 30 years of home ownership, I’ve never had to claim on my household insurance. Adding it up, that’s thousands of pounds with no return. I’m still not planning on dropping it since if I need it, I’m likely to really need it. The same goes for 3 days of supplies plus equipment (except that will cost me much less) - hopefully not needed but if I do, I’ll likely be very glad to have it.

Also, you never know what is around the corner. I shopped for supply chain disruption during Brexit (if you remember, it was suggested there might be issues December 2019). There were no such issues but I was very glad to have my stock in March / April 2020 when the Covid supply issues started.

A minimum of 3 litres per day to drink? I don’t drink that now