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?

It depends really. We do a big shopping delivery once a month. We don’t have a car so will stock up on heavy/bulky stuff so we don’t have to carry it. If you visited after we’ve just had a delivery, you’d probably think we were mad…who needs 15 tins of tinned tomatoes, but we get through it over the month. We buy fresh stuff from the little shop or fruit/veg market by us each week. By the end of the month, the cupboard is always looking empty again.

I have plenty of tins and dried food like pasta and rice. The fridge is usually full too as I shop every couple of days. But I don’t have tons as my kitchen is small.

I'm like your friend and shop every 10 days. It's because of having very little money and space for groceries. I'm on my own. It is what it is.

I am the same OP.
Partly due to living in a village with no shop, partly a habit from when we had two teenage boys at home and partly because I don't plan and like a choice. I also grow some fruit and veg so have a freezer full of that.
I have a chest freezer, an American fridge freezer and a small fridge.
I could probably feed the two of us for a couple of weeks, longer if I made bread. We would run out of carbs first.
Not much is wasted, if I cook surplus veg it goesin a bag in the freezer for soup.
My keeps even more than me, she has a walk in pantry packed to the ceiling and if either of us runs out of an ingredient we go to each other rather than make a trip to the nearest shop 7 miles away.

We have enough storage to be well stocked with staples, tins, condiments and spices. A large freezer is always half full, but our fridge/fresh needs a weekly top up. I do start to run the cupboards and freezer down from end sept, ready for the Christmas crap!

I do, like you. But I've just been through all my food cupboards and am trying to whittle it down a bit to live slightly more simply and avoid any waste :)

We only have a few days of perishables (fruit & veg, fresh meat, bread, dairy etc), but have loads of tins and packets in the cupboard, and a (very) full chest freezer with all kinds of things, including a couple of frozen loaves, a couple of cartoons of frozen milk, several bags of frozen veg, frozen chips, frozen ready meals, and a few frozen joints of meat. So we'd probably survive a couple of weeks easily with varied meals and then maybe another couple of weeks on a "boring" diet using up the tins, packets and remnants of frozen.

None of what we have in "stock" is wasted. We have virtually no food waste as we meal plan and write shopping lists, so we only buy what we are going to use when it comes to fresh/perishables, etc.

I stopped keeping so much in stock. I find it better to aim for an empty fridge and use as much up as possible.

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. 😁

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.

@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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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'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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

These replies are fascinating @DillyDeclutter I'm v similar to you. We have a 5ft single unit, top half fridge bottom.half freezer & we probably have 30 / 35 jars in ours too!
We waste virtually nothing. We eat v well & I cook from scratch 95% of the time. I make lots of soups to use up veg etc

I also rotate stock in the cupboard so things don't go out of date

We shop for fresh bits & pieces every other day.

We also eat a lot of Chinese, Japanese, Indian meals & often with lots of accompaniments

I grew up in a house where we were fortunate enough to have full cupboards & fridge. Dh did not - he grew up in a poor household & having the comfort of lots of stuff on tap means the world to him.

He often remarks how happy he is that food plays such a central role in our home life & that our dc have grown up with a different experience to him & have a wide variety of plentiful delicious food always available to them.

For those whose fridge is empty by the end of the week, how do you use up all jarred stuff?

In our fridge we always have:

Dijon mustard
Wholegrain mustard
Yellow mustard for hotdogs/ burgers
Bbq sauce
burger sauce
Jam
Marmalade
Pickles
Picked Beetroot
Pickled onions
Cranberry sauce
Mayonnaise - often multiple types at the moment we have regular hellmans, truffle mayo, sirracha mayo, kewpie mayo
Ketchup
Chutney - often multiple types
Sticky onion jam
Curds - passionfruit at the moment
Chilli paste
Curry paste
Tomato puree tube
Tubes of garlic / ginger / chilli for emergencies
Pistachio creme (a gift from Italy)

These things are used & replaced on rotation & that shelf in the fridge is never empty (though we do take them out to clean & put back)

There's pretty much always butter, cheese (fresh parmesan, sliced emmental and cheddar), juice apple & orange, eggs, bacon, yoghurt, milk, cream

Then we add vegetables, fruit, salad, meat, chicken & fish every couple of days

However! We have stopped stockpiling stuff in the freezer so much as the power went while we were out overnight last year & we had to dump a lot of stuff. Plus I often forget stuff is in there & then I don't fancy it & it tastes of freezer etc

So we really only have frozen peas, frozen skin on chips, frozen fish (breaded haddock), ice cubes, small amount of ice cream (1 tub of ben & Jerry's or mini cornettos at a time) sometimes frozen pizza, cauliflower rice & the odd time I freeze chicken or meat if we've bought it but our plans change. But I'm careful to use it v quickly after freezing.

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.

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.