HM Gov telling us to get tinned food and bottled water?

[DecisionTime123]

Call me old fashioned, but isn't this sort of thing likely to provoke a run on toilet rolls? Couldnt find any other threads on it, but I think there is a "preppers" topic on here somewhere. In any case, what do you think? I'm sort of concerned, should I be? Or has this gone under the radar?

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/aug/25/uk-to-warn-citizens-to-stock-up-on-food-amid-threat-from-climate-crisis-and-hostile-states

Much longer than that

What on earth

I think it makes sense to keep enough in so that you can manage for a few days without shopping or cooking, even if the meals aren't very interesting or perfectly balanced.

If the emergency goes beyond that, you're going to need the means defend your stash and personally, I think a cyanide pill would be more useful.

Agree!
That microwave rice is already cooked and can be eaten cold - rice salad.
Ditto the pouches of lentil and other pulses, many of which have flavouring in.
A few tins of tuna or sardines. tinned pineapple, tinned or jarred hot dogs can be eaten cold if you fancy such things.
Oat biscuits, biscuits. Those packs of brioche rolls have long long use by dates.
All available cheaply in Lidl etc.

Those of us who camp usually have a stove and some gas handy. Maybe a BBQ and charcoal too.

I am highly aware thank you.
Life continues as we recognise it. We buy flights from easyJet when their fares come out, and self cater in a flat we found ourselves. We don't go on a luxury all inclusive holiday to a popular resort. We buy supermarket and eBay ex big brand uniform, or from Vinted.

We still have food, clothes, a house, parks to enjoy, can go for walks or bike rides from home. I am not sure what you think has changed, but we weren't eating steak weekly or going to the Med before prices increased either. We like holidaying in cooler climes and we always buy second hand when we can.

What has changed so unrecognisably in your life?

I'm honestly reading this thread and seeing people who make their own lives small. It sounds like you are all living in bunkers.

We did not prep or stock up on anything when COVID hit. We were lucky enough that we buy loo roll in bulk (because of where we buy it from) and DH got in the habit of buying flour in bulk as he already used a bread machine. We just used what we had and replaced when needed (switched to click and collect instead of delivery or shopping in store). If we couldn't find something specific we made do.

Where we live there was a 3 day power cut during a storm about 10 years ago. We had no particular supplies in but we survived, with two under -5s. Only annoying thing was some chicken in the freezer defrosted so when the power went on again I cooked it all and refroze some of it.

If the shit hits the fan there is really no point to this. This is giving me “ When the wind blows” vibes, the old couple dutifully following the government pamphlet as their hair fell out.

During Covid, councils organised delivering food to the most vulnerable as did other organisations. If the issues are worse than that society will really go to shit and some bottled water and tins of sardines isn’t going to help much.

1/7 are on antidepressants. Time to block Mumsnet again to keep me off it and get some fresh air (while I still can).

I binned most of the stock pile of pasta and rice a few years later.

Shockingly bad household management. Having bought the stuff, why on earth didn't you eat it over a year or so?
Don't you keep an eye on the dates of stuff in your cupboards and make a point of rotating, i.e. always eat the older items first?

I already had my stash so I just bought things I needed for home Ed like a printer, a spare laptop ( 3 kids in school and college) , a stand mixer, a microscope and slides and home education bits. I even picked up a new lazy spa hot tub on sale and a second hand kiln and potters wheel and a bag of clay in early Feb.

Brilliant. Everyone needs a kiln and some clay - standard prepping list items.
😂

To be honest im often stunned how little people keep in.

I was at a friends house recently. Shes well off, her & DH both high earning professionals. Yet had almost no "store cupboard". She had a single 500g pack of pasta. No flours whatsoever. 2 sachets of microwave rice, no dried at all. No beans or lentils. A single tin of chopped tomatoes.

At any given time my cupboard has tons of stuff. Several kilos of bread, baking and pasta flours, 6-8 tins of various beans, bags of different types of lentils, several kilos if rice, half a dozen cans of tomatoes at least, tins of fruit & sweetcorn, tins of tuna, sardines, spam, corned beef. The freezer
always has chicken thighs, sausages, mince

If the world went into lockdown tomorrow i could feed my family for a while. I understand its a privilege to afford lots of surplus but im amazed when i find that well off friends keep almost nothing!

Sorry but you seem totally oblivious to the fact other people's lives are different to yours.
I'm a pensioner who lives alone. I spent the majority of Covid lock down by myself and I, like a lot of people, particularly of my generation, was affected badly by the isolation.

There is little support from the NHS in the area I live in because the health board is cash strapped and the gp's surgery is chronically understaffed. During Covid of course it was impossible to get dental appointments and it has taken a long time for dental services to recover. I had to end up going privately in order to get appointments. Similary the opticians took a tremendously long time to be able to operate without restrictions abd tbh my opticians is nowhere near as good as pre covid as regards availability of appointments. These are issues that impact my life together with the deteriorating public transport system, the cost of living, people's general behaviour in public, the problems with customer service when things don't go right. Obviously these things are not issues in your life

So yes my life has shrunk. I do the best I can and I live as full a life as my social anxiety allows . I manage by affairs to the best of my ability. My lifestyle is as different from yours as chalk and cheese.

Is that you, Nigella?

How often do you generally eat them?

Do a calculation: you usually eat two tins a month, the expiry date on the tins is two year ahead, so the max you can store is 2 tins x 24 months = 48 tins.
BUT then you would have to be sure to rotate them and always eat the oldest tins first whenever you buy new, and if your rate of eating them dropped, some would go out of date.
So I would say no more than a year's worth of you normal consumption rate.

If you never normally eat them, don't buy any. Only store things you are going to eat anyway.

oh that's intersting... I have got Tilda pots and it definitely says needs cooking. There are instructions for stir frying it though.

I'm sorry you feel like that. We have two children who were primary age during COVID and one has SEN. They suffered from isolation during lockdown but we've made huge efforts to get their lives back to normal. You have to make the best of your situation and that's what we try to do.

I don't think there's been any deterioration that has affected us in public behaviour or customer service. I think these things are what you make of them. If you are expecting people to annoy you then it's not that surprising if they do!

I have complex eye issues but I wouldn't say a slightly lower level of appointment availability affects me (in fact I can still get next day appointments at our local chain opticians so I'm not quite sure what you want in terms of availability!).

I'm honestly reading this thread and seeing people who make their own lives small. It sounds like you are all living in bunkers.

I find this sort of attitude absolutely bizarre. Of course people are still going out, going on holiday, spending time with friends, going to work and all the various other things most people get up to. It's just that some of us also like to keep enough items in stock that we could look after ourselves and our friends and neighbours for a few days if we needed to. As others have said, it's basic common sense really....a shame the government have to remind people!

It seems completely sensible to me. Just in my own circumstances I can think of plenty of times it's come in useful when we haven't been able to or wanted to go to the supermarket. When we've been ill, when I didn't want to queue outside Tesco during the pandemic, power cuts, severe weather etc. We already know there's going to be high food inflation this winter, compounded by the weather and bad year farmers have had so even from a budgeting point of view it makes sense to buy some extras of the food you usually eat to mitigate price rises a bit.

DH was made redundant a couple of years ago when I was on maternity leave and I was really glad we had quite a good stockpile of basics like pasta, rice and lentils and a freezer full of bread, fruit and veg as we could really cut back on our shopping bill for the time it took him to find a new job. Personally I don't feel worried at all and in fact it gives me some peace of mind.

@drspouse
I 'm now struggling to believe in your idyllic life where there is no deterioration in public behaviour and where you always get good customer service and where everything is hunky dory in the NHS and dental services! I can only assume you never read or listen to the news
Of course we have to make the best of the lives we have but I would need to be an ostrich not to be aware of the issues I, and so many many others face in the world we now live in.

drspouse
"I'm honestly reading this thread and seeing people who make their own lives small. It sounds like you are all living in bunkers."

How does wanting to be comfortable in a power or water cut, or if I had to leave my house in an emergency make my life small?

This is a really extreme misrepresentation of what prepping is for most people.

If the water goes off for a day or two it's really handy if you have some bottled water in.

If there's a power cut it's good to have candles and a camping stove.

If there are delivery issues with the supermarkets it's reassuring if you have stuff in to last a few days.

If there's a fire or a flood it's a good idea to have a bag you can grab with a few essentials in it.

If these things all happen at once, everywhere, and it looks likely to last more than a couple of days then yes, the shit has hit the fan and all bets are off. But mostly they don't, they happen one at a time, here and there. They all happen frequently enough to be worth preparing for.

The covid food deliveries did not spring into action overnight. DMum was on the CEV list and should have been prioritised for supermarket home deliveries but for a good couple of weeks her slots kept getting cancelled and her supplies ran really low. So she signed up for the council deliveries but by the time the scheme properly started, the supermarkets had sorted out their priority lists.

I was very grateful that I had a stock of spare food so I could help her out in the meantime.

I have about 30L of water stored in the house...mostly because I have a combi boiler and no hot water tank and I have zero trust that our water company could organise a piss up in a brewery and supply water in the event of a major outage. I know the plastic degrades so I swap it every 18 months or so.

I usually have extra tins and dry goods in but after a few days we'll be eating an interesting mix of things. Cous cous with a side of custard anyone...?

exactly this, also round here, the cev delivery was weird at first. People were getting stuff like 2 cabbages and a potato or a huge block of cheese and nothing else. Local volunteers took over to redistribute food and deliver supermarket shopping. There was goss that there was a cwerain amount of defrauding going on and people were getting paid for groceries that never got delivered but I never heard the end of the story. The weird deliveries were true though.

it was definitely a tipsy eBay purchase but I’m an artist and was using the pandemic to learn new skills. Used the hot tub to ease the back pain after potting but that was just a happy accident . But all those purchases were made to enhance our lives while we were forced to stay home. I could do that because everything else was taken care of. We had a brilliant time tbh and I would do it all over again.

I got a massive catering tin of tomatoes and another of peas plus some black bananas from the first CEV delivery. Called up and cancelled any further deliveries immediately as we had about 6 months of food so didn't want to take from others who needed it. Most of ours was purchased before 2020 with a few extra bits added a month or two before lockdown as we could see what was coming.

DH loved having what he called the Great Tower of Lager.

That microwave rice is already cooked and can be eaten cold - rice salad.

Yes, that's a useful thought.

I was also thinking of that vacuum sealed rye bread.

Tinned fruit is nicer cold than beans or meat.

A barbecue would seem quite luxurious in those circumstances!

Everyone deals with (what is objectively) worrying information differently. Your response- pretty common- is to try and control your worry with preparedness. Truth is your preparedness may or may not be effective but it does sooth you and make you feel more comfortable

for some people, preparedness doesn’t really help with the worry.

for some people, they’ll read this coy “I just can’t believe how many rich people don’t keep 20kg flour in their cupboard” or “it’s just common sense to keep 3 days food” or “everyone else in the world does it, aren’t British people useless” posts and feel SHIT about themselves, their expectations of what “good” people do, and their own lifestyles that don’t meet this.

you really don’t know how other posters react emotionally to this discussion which is why the poster who mentioned anxiety is spot on imo. This is objectively an anxiety inducing conversation.

cous cous is another good suggestion.