Are we actually stockpiling food following govt announcement??

[Mumoftwo8519]

DH and I have a 4 year old, 2 year old and a 9 month old baby. I feel like this govt announcement to stockpile food is just media scaremongering and I’ve ignored it up until now, but tonight after I put our children to bed and turned out their lights out and the house was pitch black I did think to myself, god what if this was actually it and we were put into a blackout.

Im worried about having food to feed my children, and the thought of them going hungry is starting to worry me, but I also cannot bring myself to believe something will actually happen??

is anyone else stockpiling? What kind of things are you getting? Are we actually going to eat cold beans from a tin?

my husband and I were talking about it tonight, and wondering what the govt are hiding?

The price of fresh ginger has gone mental recently, unless it was a glitch on Sainsbury"s website?

Just get in tinned and packet versions of the foods you like to eat normally, making sure that some of them can be eaten without cooking first (just in case the electricity goes off). For water you can get big 5 litre bottles for under £2 at the supermarket.

I routinely have extra tins of various kinds of veg, cold meats, beans, pulses, fish, soup etc and packets of things like rice, pasta and bread flour. Because it's the sort of food I usually eat it's easy to keep the stock rotating and nothing ends up wasted.

@Mumoftwo8519 our winter store is never wasted if we haven't had to use it by spring then we reduce the weekly shop by stuff in the store and a lot of the stuff we have is useful for camping trip meals or self catering for first night.

In the last 12 years we haven't had a winter where we haven't had to use it though. Storm Arwen was definitely the worst but even this year in January 2026 we had nearly a week of not getting out because of 2m snow drifts blocking the road.

My experience of supermarket disruption has always been in the following order of running out.....milk, bread, eggs, fresh veg. We now always have bread flour and yeast along with uht milk.

The 3 day prep is be fine, a back up light source, power bank and a radio. And to have enough cash for 3 days if the banking system is affected.

The government will guide us after that anyway like they did with COVID. We won't be on our own. I think its because there is a lot of change in the world at the moment, with AI and citizens mixing so much. It has to affect the relationship between countries really. Id imagine it will settle down again given time

Yeah like not drinking wster sat in plastic bottles for god knows how long. Ill tske my chances thanks.

An example I gave on another similar thread was that this summer, we had no water supply three evenings in a row. Because we had bottled water, we didn’t have rush to the supermarkets (which ran out fairly quickly), or drive a few miles to the water stations. That’s all it’s saying. Have bits and bobs in to make life a little easier.

We already had the big one for Scotland yesterday as an Amber. Tonight tomorrow for us is "only" a yellow warning.
That sounds quite blaze but where we live we get at least 1 red warning storm a year. Most people I know are pretty sensible we batten down the hatches, wait for it to pass and only go out if we absolutely have to.

I have a gas hob, so assume that is useable for this list. And some will be more useable for supply chain issues or water issues than power issues.

microwaveable pouches of rice, lentil Dahl, and noodle meals, tinned soup, tin of corned beef, tins of tuna, mackerel in tomato sauce, tinned veg, tined fruit, dried fruit, uHT milk, long life juice,

I’m pretty much covered for supply issues or water or electric only or unexpected bills leaving me short of money. I am a bit short of things I can eat if I lose the gas and electric short of eating cold soup and cold beans so grateful for ideas on that. Short of buying a camping stove.

Absolutely - I am being more aware of my family's winter readiness..

We have a good camping supply, and we have some wood burning stoves we can cook on if needed. We have various lights too. We don't have a radio yet.

We have three young children, with allergies, so we do want to make sure we have a good supply of medicines and the right food for over three days.

We have plans to buy bottled water soon. Our local village has just had a power cut which lasted longer than a lot of people found comfortable, and yet, that was less than three days. We felt relatively fine.

No

Each to their own. But water supplied by water companies has also been sat in plastic bottles so I hope there's no outage that can't be repaired near you x

@Mumoftwo8519 you have to ask yourself “do you think we live in a world that a cyber attack is a possibility.?”Your answer will tell you to do the right thing .
It’s an insurance policy that’s all . Nothing more important than insuring your kids are ok.

Thanks for the handy reminder - the storms are raging outside so I have just plugged one of my camping lanterns in - I'll try to remember to dig the others out tomorrow and charge them up too.

I don't have any water or UHT milk, so I will stick that in my next food order. Plenty of food in the cupboards, and I have a gas stove so I assume I could use that, and just light it using a lighter?

I don't have a wind up radio, so that's worth thinking about.

My elderly mom lives quite rurally and keeps camping lanterns and charging packs charged at all times, as she has a lot of power cuts.

It's worth thinking these things through, but no need for a mass panic.

We don't get power or water disruptions in the city I live in. But it sounds like something is coming, so I have stocked up.
I do buy weekly normally so by the end of the week I would normally not have that much in.

If you label water bottles with the date, you can drink the newer ones and use the older ones for cooking, hygiene or flushing the loo.

I'd rather risk a bit of plastic getting into my system than face dehydration. We have a lot of water (stored under the kitchen table) but I imagine we'd drink cans of kombucha and other soft drinks and keep the water for other things, if the 'event' happened soon after a Costco visit. If we used the camping stove (which would be in extremis as it's for outdoor use, so in a storm it would be a real 'short straw' activity) I would boil enough water for hot drinks, and store it in thermoses, but otherwise I think we'd get by with cold drinks for a few days.

We're not rural, but I've always had an emergency box, mostly so I know where things are in an emergency. If I had to go rooting through drawers and in random cupboards looking for things (particularly in the dark) I'd never find anything. From memory, there are batteries in there, camping lanterns, thermal hats and gloves, a decent power bank, disposable hand warmers, the obligatory wind-up radio, medication, a first aid kit, toothpaste and hand sanitiser, loo rolls, a notebook and pen, and probably things I've forgotten. We also have a few rechargeable lamps in the house, and I'm going to make a point of charging them all every Sunday so they'll be ready if needed - reminder on my phone. I'm scared of the dark, so knowing there is plenty of light available is important to me. Oh, I've remembered a head torch is in the box, too.

The kitchen is well stocked with food, and always has been. We always have large tubs of lentils, rice, pasta, beans and so on - no good if there is no power and water is limited, but there is also a supply of tins and jars, and pouches with veggie meals such as savoury rice and 3 ban chilli, so we'd be ok for a while without cooking. I've been adding tins of tuna and similar to my weekly shop, so we should manage.

I don't need them now, but if you have women of menstrual age in the house remember to keep san-pro too, and maybe a crossword book, playing cards or children's games depending on who lives with you - there will be no TV in a power cut.

I'm not preparing for the apocalypse (frankly, I'd rather not face that, so would include a cyanide pill if I had one), but am happy to rough it for a few days if the power goes down or the supply chain is disrupted.

I can’t remember what spurred it on, but a month or so ago I started ordering more tinned basics than before…ready to eat pulses, tinned soup, tinned fish, tinned tomatoes, mandarin segments, tinned pineapple, and about 30litres of bottled water.

It’s all stuff we use, so we’ve been eating it and replacing as we go. But overall we have probably a month’s worth of ready-to-eat (if not delectable) food in the cupboard. We always buy catfood and loo roll in bulk.

It gives me some comfort that if supply chains are damaged, we’d be fine. Though, if power was affected we’d have to eat our way through the freezer quickly as it’s astonishingly full of random tubs of soup bases and stocks, and random bulk cooked meals.

Plenty of people did with the Asda glitch this morning 😂

I live in an area of the country that has had more than its fair share of water outages in the past few years. Not just hosepipe bans/ low pressure but no water at all. For days. Including in the run up to Xmas one year.

That experience taught me that having a supply of bottled water is really, really important. I also have water butts that I could use for toilet flushing. And a camping shower.

I also have solar panels, big storage batteries and an EV car. And electric heaters so that we do not rely on gas.

The freezer and pantry are well stocked. But I could definitely do with stocking up on cereal bars, long life milk, coffee, toilet roll.

Keeping portable chargers topped up is a good idea. As is a supply of batteries and torches.

I never thought I’d be one for prepping and didn’t panic buy during Covid. But not being able to flush our toilet for days on end, having to queue to get bottled water etc is very sobering.

@Ohcrap082024 where hasn't had running water in the UK? I am shocked

I keep more than 3 days worth of food in the house anyway, and we are a family that like camping so we have a stove, fuel and a bbq with some leftover summer coal.

i didn’t ever keep water in the house so I have gone out and bought 20L for 3 of us. I am also going to charge the USB camping lamps and buy a wind up radio. I feel I will then be fairly prepared for a free days much longer and we would still find it difficult

I saw someone comment on a post and it put it in perspective for me. Where times have changed most of us especially in the urban areas have relied on convenience. Thinking back to when we were kids my parents always had plenty of bits in the cupboards that they could make something of for probably 5-7 days if we didn’t go shopping. We also went camping more as a holiday, tent camping, so more people had a camping stove and torches or lights. I remember we had packs of tea lights too that were for power cuts, which seemed more frequent than what we get now even though i live in the same area. We had a gas cooker and a radio was standard where as now a lot of kitchens are entirely electric with induction hobs etc, and not many people have radios in the house now. We all used cash more so had it on us. Now modern life has changed a lot many of us don’t think back to that. Other than the bottled water, the advice felt like normal life back in the 80s and 90s.
A big storm hit Ireland last year and a lot of people had no power for a week or so, someone I watch on instagram was over there and she was prepping a few days ahead of the storm and then in the week after showing how they were managing.

It really isn't.

Many of the supply chains both supermarket and utilities work on a just enough/just in time basis. This has been fine when life is stable

The advent of AI is revealing weaknesses in computer systems (like the php thing) that historically might have been missed or just too impossible/laborious to exploit without AI. Seeing the freezers go down in France is an example of potential disruption

The war in Ukraine has been ongoing for 4 years with little sign of resolution. One of Iran's military tactics is to cause aa much annoyance or disruption to anyone who helps America. It has done this with missiles. However If Russia starts doing this, cyber attacks to vulnerable infrastructure to countries seems to be the obvious choice. Its low risk (especially to your own people) high reward

Secondly if extreme weather events become more common, it will take time for infrastructure repairs.

A just in time system is incredibly vulnerable to both these problems

The UK has essentially been at a peace time and stable standing for 80 years. This does need to change. It probably isn't about all out war or end times but just a more volatile world system. None of this if you listen to the news should be too shocking

Tunbridge Wells. It was actually for a surprisingly long length of time

my wind up radio serves as a torch and a charger, which is very handy imo

Bristol last winter. Family member was without water for a good few days. Wasn’t many houses but that wasn’t much consolation to her when she couldn’t wash at home.