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

[IsThisCluttered]

I'm an over shopper, I recognise that. We ALWAYS have food in the fridge, freezer & pantry.

I have an enormous range of herbs & spices & condiments & we use them all v regularly as we cook a lot & often make more complex dishes.

We pretty much always have stuff that could make a meal or several meals if anything happened & we couldn't get to the shops.

I have a lot of things like various types of rice, pasta, flours, sugars, tinned tomatoes & many types of beans & pulses.

I was in a friend's house recently & was a bit surprised how little food she had in her cupboard & fridge. It was spartan. She said she strictly only buys what's needed that week & by the end of the week the supplies are gone & the frudhd is literally empty.

I get that we're all different but I feel anxious when we start to run low (which would still mean there's a lot of food to someone else) & having a full fridge gives me a sense of calm & peace.

I did not grow up with a shortage of food so don't know why this is.

I'm curious how other people manage this?

I do a shop once a week, but there's always enough in the cupboards and freezer to feed us for 3-4 days if needed, even if it's just tinned soup, beans and frozen stuff.

We got snowed in last winter for three days - all the roads in/out of town were impassable and the shops quickly ran dry. I was very grateful that we had a good stock of food in the house!

I could actually have written the post i am exactly the same, i shop online with a delivery pass so can have deliveries as often as i like and some weeks if things start running down i order more a few days after my last delivery 😳 i think i am a compulsive shopper 😁

Only DH and I at home, but freezer and cupboards generally well stocked (sound similar to you with lots of condiments / spices etc which get used regularly). We do buy lots of salad stuff, fresh meat and seafood, but the fridge is never stacked full as just the 2 of us and Ddog and we hate waste. We will also periodically run the freezer stock down to bare minimum so we don't end up with ancient 'bargains' languishing on the bottom shelf though. It's rare we waste anything but there's always loads of meal options even if we have forgotten to take something out of the freezer.

I am exactly the same. I overspend dramatically... I always think we need a variation of meal available at all times and I hate meal planning because I never grew up with it and we always ate what we fancied on the day.
I wish I could spend less and be more routine but I find myself buying food almost daily

I'm exactly like this. Loads of stuff at home.

I always have at least a month worth of food in plus what we are eating that week.

I’ve recently become more like you. We went through a period of having very little money and meant cupboards and fridge were sparse and no extras. It made me genuinely unhappy.
Now we get 2 deliveries a week, full stocked pantry of herbs/spices/grains/tins. Fridge and freezer never less than half full. It makes me feel safe and if anything ever happened we’d be ok for a while. It’s security to me.

I would have thought that the majority of people are more like you than your friend (obvious caveat aside that many people can't afford to build up stocks in the first place) especially if they cook a lot.

I think we could live for almost a month on what is in my fridge, freezer and cupboards. We would definitely have some odd combinations and black tea and coffee when the milk ran out but we would survive.

No I don’t overbuy as we don’t have anywhere to store surplus food.

I do have lots of food in but I don’t overspend - I just like to be able to make a variety of things easily. Anything that stores for a while I’ll have a couple of packets of. I buy tinned tomatoes, rice, nuts etc in bulk but we do use all of these things a lot! I cook mostly from scratch and it’s great to be able to pull a full meal together from the cupboards.

I usually buy dried and tinned food in bulk so we'd be ok for a few days if the apocalypse comes.

But if it comes on a Monday I'd say we'd have to chance it with the zombies by the Friday especially if the power goes off so we can't boil pasta.

I do meal plan as we have 3 DC with busy evenings, we both work (me part time) Clubs etc

But I could probably always make 3/4 days of meals.

if I ‘ran out’ of the recent shop I had done:

I always have types of flour, pulses, rice, pasta and noodles
herbs and spices
tins of fish, veg, soup
Cereals and oats
nuts and seeds
peanut butter. Jam. Marmite

Fridge has basic fruit, butter cheese milk, cheese spread

then freezer has some meat (bought on offer!)
Left over things like Bolognaise, chilli, lasagne.
peas
frozen fruit
bread

I waste hardly anything, which is why I do meal plan.

Yes, cupboards stocked, so there’s always pasta, rice, herbs, oven chips, soup, beans etc.

I have a big freezer and a small freezer full of assorted leftovers and cupboards of longer life stuff. I think the problem would be milk and butter. Everything else, well meals might be a bit odd but we could probably eat for a month or so.

My parents, from India, always had a variety of lentils, chickpeas, flour for chapattis and rice when we were growing up plus staples of onions, potatoes, vegetables bought weekly. So, if anyone ever turns up- there is always food to feed. I have carried on with that. North Indian cooking is very easy and economical.

My fridge isnt overly stocked, but my cupboards are quite full and I always make things to top the freezer up.

Snap.

It’s a standing joke among my friends that they would all come to mine in the event of zombie apocalypse/food shortages.

I always have tons of food.

I grew up hungry, which I think explains it in my case.

Yes we have loads. I have a chest freezer and big double larder unit, both of which are full. We live very rurally, 10 minutes from any kind of shop and 20 minutes from the supermarket so it's partly why. We also do a lot of cooking and entertaining so I want to be able to pull together a meal or decide to make bread/bake a cake without having to go to a shop for ingredients.

I think I’m a bit too far the other way. Weekly online shop based on the meal plan for the week. By the time of the next shop the fridge is looking a bit sparse. I don’t have lots of space for surplus stuff.

I meal plan, and do a main shop weekly, so fridge/cupboards more full some days than others. We don't have a big freezer (it died and we're waiting until we finish the kitchen decorating/flooring to get a new one) but I have reasonably well stocked cupboards and could certainly feed us for a short while if we couldn't get to shops/shops didn't have much. We live on an island and so deliveries can be cancelled/late due to weather. We also try not to waste food. There's only 3 of us (2 adults, 1xteen who eats like an adult).

I’m always well stocked, fridge, freezers, pantry, including a large amount of baking ingredients.

We waste very very little food, my mum was the same, so I’ve obviously learned by example!
Im also very aware this is a very privileged position to be in

Yes, my kitchen cupboards are always full (and well organised, with good rotation so I rarely find out of date stuff) and so is my freezer. When the first lockdown happened I also had an extra stash of tinned and dried foods that I'd collected in case Brexit caused food supply chain issues. I no longer have that stockpile. Whenever the children visit they head for the kitchen to see if I have any interesting ingredients that they can scavenge.

I tell DH that I keep the kitchen cupboards full because otherwise he'd fill them with bike parts and bike cleaning equipment, but it's really just what I learned to do from my mother when I was growing up and it's something I've done everywhere I've lived.

I buy fresh veg fruit milk bread cheese ham every week and always have a stock of food in. Tins and jars, rice, pasta, couscous, noodles. Also usually quite a bit of meat fish in the freezer plus freezer food like pizzas etc. And usually extra bread in there too. Although we'd miss the fresh things and would end up eating some strange combinations we could live for at least a month on what we have in the cupboards/freezer at any one time. Obviously in an apocalypse and no power the freezer stuff would go off but apparently if you keep it shut it stays frozen for a while.