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 buy “food”: whatever looks good quality and is a good price. I take it home. I cook it. I do this once a week. So generally on a weekly basis I buy fruit, vegetables, meat, fish, bread, milk, cheese

This is essentially what I do. My husband does a “Ready steady cook” every night with what we have in so our meals are always quite varied.

Fridge wise I fill it up with what I know we're going to use that week as otherwise there is a lot of waste. But pantry cupboard and freezer could probably keep us fed for a week or two, not hugely nutritiously but not hungry

I shop most days because that's how I prefer to do it, I'm not sure what's hard to understand about it. People live differently.

We have way too much really. Since DH retired he has taken over and he is obsessed with menu planning and on line supermarket deliveries each week. Whether we need it or not. And he forgets to delete stuff we don’t need so we can end up with lots d certain things. Last year it was cranberry sauce. We ended up with six jars of it!

We have two full freezers and a well stocked fridge. Very well stocked food pantry. And drawers. And another cupboard. We do cook with lots of spices and condiments though.

I think when DH was growing up money was tight and it partly stems from that. And at one point we lived in Eastern Europe and could get snowed in so we kept a big stock of stuff.

We do a freezer inventory every so often and menu plan around that. And our menu plans aren’t set in stone. We list five or six things and make sure we have the ingredients for those in but they can happen any day in the week. And often things change.

I think people have kept a store of food for thousands of years probably. I love to see shelves filled with jars of homemade chutneys, jams and bottled fruits all ready to get us through the winter. Something deeply primitive about being able to feed your family when the days are dark and cold especially.

Since the scares around Brexit (severe food shortages were predicted), Covid, local water supply cut off etc we always have a big stash of dried pulses, beans, peas, grains and cooking ingredients, plus some tins. We could definitely survive for a month and we are often feeding friends and family who visit too so like to be able to cobble something together at short notice.

We nearly always meal plan for health reasons and also hate waste like PPs. Love that feeling when there’s a list of meals on the fridge, all the shopping done and we don’t have to think about it all for a week.

If the apocalypse comes, I’m going to be fine for at least 3 months.

@DillyDeclutter 37 jars? How big is your fridge?!

@Vabenejulio i roughly plan what meals we’re having. Ie, sat - chicken and rice, Sunday -roast, Monday - spag bol, and then buy the food accordingly. However, it’s flexible (apart from roast on Sunday) so we may end up having spag Bol another day, or pulling pizza and chips out of freezer if time-short.

We’re a mix of in between, when we have limited funds we run down the stocks, at the moment we could probably do main meals for 2 weeks, they might get a bit repetitive but ordinarily we do meal plan mainly based on what we have that could be used and what’s on offer that week.
Usually every month when I’m paid I go to a discount shop which requires a membership and stock up on heavily discounted surplus meat (£1 for 500g beef mince, £2 for 900g chicken breasts) which I chuck in the freezer, sometimes you end up with lots of chicken, other times it’s lots of sausages. I try and mix it up with buying extra from the shops so that we end up with a variety of proteins. We then make a meal plan based on what meat I managed to get and since it’s mostly in the freezer we decide the night before what we’ll have the next day.
We don’t keep much fresh though and most veg is frozen so we don’t waste things.

I'm more like your friend tbh. I shop for the week and the night before the shop is due, my fridge is nearly empty 😂
I always make sure there's enough for sandwiches, enough food in the cupboards and the freezer though. It's only the fridge that will look a bit bare.

There's never anything in my freezer apart from frozen peas and vodka.
I make sure there are tins of everything in...kidney beans, chickpeas, tomatoes etc.
Buy fresh food/ meal plan every 4 days.

I have a lot of food in stock. It's home economics for me, both time and money. Also a 20th century awareness that not everything is available all the time. Stood me well in the COVID lockdowns. Nor can you always get out to get something. Being at the mercy of supermarket delivery services a lot of the time I make sure I have one in stock so if a new one can't be had for a while it's less of an annoyance.

I think it’s normal to have random stuff in the freezer, half empty condiments in the fridge, and random jars/tins in the cupboard. Who uses all their herbs & spices in one week, my mum has some as old as me!

I don't overbuy because my parents are overbuyers and also hoarders. In their kitchen and pantry you will find 6 or seven of everything.

I can't bear it so I shop little and often and keep a very limited range of spices, oils etc.

Same

I’m like you but only since Covid and want to change back.

Think when things went mad in 2020 I had a space in the garage where I had a few extra tins and bags of pasta and things like that that I built up.

Now I seem to have cupboards over spilling and it’s really annoying me. Want to go back to having enough for the week and meat and tidy cupboards again. Shops are only a 5 min drive away and deliveries are possible if I was ill or something. Feel like I have a lot of food clutter 🤣

Same here... always have full cupboards and freezer, fridge gets bit depleted before big shop but never empty and there's been lots of times in recent years I've been glad of it (hello 2020 covid! And the newborn years...)

We didn't have lots of food (or nice food) growing up and my parents still have very sparse fridge etc except for Christmases (by choice now rather than lacking) so always having plenty in gives me a sense of comfort and is something I definitely prioritise

When we had the first lockdown I didn’t need any shopping for 3 weeks. I had stocked up a bit though because I could see it coming.

You one of those who saw it coming months before hand? 🙄

The only thing I found hard to get during Covid was yeast & then I gave up the notion of baking my own bread & just bought shop bread.

Always have what we need. Hate food waste so need to meal plan and make sure everything fresh is used. Plenty of leftover meals in the freezer, should we need. Lots of snacks/cupboard food - tins, noodles, biscuits, crackers - items that won’t spoil.

I grew up with an empty fridge at Mums and full fridge at Nans, so I’m a little inbetween. I don’t get worried if my fridge isn’t full, but would feel uneasy if I didn’t have all my meals planned for the week, but this is only since having kids.

I buy stuff on offer so there's always a surplus
Couldn't get a delivery at the start of covid and I managed 6 weeks with what I had in. Was some odd meals though!

I don't even have a pantry!

My fridge is usually pretty empty, I do have food in the freezer and cupboards but not really enough stuff to make a proper meal. I tend to buy foods on the spur of the moment without meal planning or much thought as to what I will do with them, often things like curry pastes and chutneys and hot sauce etc but not really foods that can be eaten without other fresh ingredients, which I rarely think to buy. My freezer is full with items such as ice cream and ice lollies and then things like onion rings and frozen Yorkshire puddings that don’t actually constitute a meal and I rarely actually cook. I mostly eat toast for breakfast/ lunch and then in the evening either eat ready meals or take aways which I buy the day I need them as I rarely have what’s needed to cook a meal in the evening. I have adhd and autism, I hate going to the supermarket and meal planning just completely overwhelms me so even online shopping feels too much. If I couldn’t get to the shops for some reason I could survive on the food I have in for a week or two without starving but would be eating some very very odd combinations.

I plan because I'm single and mostly batch cook so I eat a lot of "ready meals" (homemade and frozen into individual portions)

This week I've realised I've no frozen chicken meal so I looked up a recipe for one to batch cook and freeze. I have most of the ingredients in. Then I will have some spare ingredients from it so I found another recipe that uses up the sun dried tomatoes and Parmesan for my lunches

Lunch - there is always tuna, ham, cheese, eggs and bread in so I can mix it up

Tea - I will batch cook 6 portions of the chicken to freeze. But I won't eat it all that week! The freezer has lasagne, cottage pie, beef stew etc and I always have eggs, beans, frozen chips and veg, salad, feta, halloumi etc in

I used to, but had a walk in pantry (1930's council house, always great storage). Now I don't have a lot of space for dried/tinned, so only buy as I run out. I do have two fridge/freezers. I could always make three mains for two. We have lots of shops within five minutes and family about, so I don't over buy.

"I don’t understand people who go to the shops almost every day and only buy food for one or two days at a time"
A relative who I care for lives between an Aldi and Lidl, I can get my bus home from outside either. So I tend to buy fresh for a couple of days. I do a Tesco shop for heavy stuff weekly, which my DP picks me up from. I'm finding that the dates on stuff are getting shorter.

I have a lot of freezer space and use it, we get a monthly meat delivery and I grocery shop regularly. I also batch cook and freeze. But I can be feeding from 1 to 16 on any given night, I usually get advanced notice on the larger numbers, but occasionally not and its very easy to be able to grab meat and veg from the freezer, pasta or pulses and canned tomatoes from the larder and throw together a stew or some such. I can have leftover fresh veg in my fridge, if my estimates are off, but am quite good at inventing home made ‘fridge drawer’ soups to use it and then I freeze them in individual portions..which works for a night when its just me.
I keep a good stock of toiletries and cleaning products, but we tend to have just a single variety of each, so they get used and replaced regularly.

I wish I could use the regular delivery thing on Amazon for some of my most used products, but our speed of use varies so much at the moment that I cant make it work for me.

So I suppose I am saying that we have high stocks of most things, but low waste.