How much food do you have stored?

Think I could survive for about a couple of months on current supplies including tins of miscellaneous contents and small freezer compartments.

We have an American fridge freezer in the kitchen and the old American fridge freezer in the garage. I batch cook every 3 months or so and always have prepared sauces, bolognaise, chilli, curries along with cottage pie and chicken puff pastry pies, freshly frozen meat and fish in freezers along with basic veggies.

I am fortunate to have two full height double larder cupboards in the kitchen so dry goods along with tins are replenished in a big shop every couple of months. Fresh veggies, bread, milk, meat, fish and dairy are purchased locally as and when

Like Kittylester having a large family and pre-Covid they were often dropping round I could always (and still can) knock up a meal for 6+

Well I'm a bit like you grannyactivist though since we gave up the allotment we have given our largest preserving pan to our daughter.
We've never done much frozen (didn't have a freezer or fridge for many years) so most of ours is in kilner jars but I also could feed an army.

We have enough crockery and cutlery for maybe 40 though it won't all match and currently have 16kg bags of dried beans, industrial quantities of flour and loads of tins. I have learned during lock-down that I don't need to buy nuts, seeds, dried fruit etc in 5kg bags and have downsized accordingly but I hate to look at the price difference when you buy smaller amounts.

Like you, we were mostly 6 to 8 but you only needed one more family or a few children's friends for example and you'd be double that.
Like you there's been two of us for over a year. Very strange. I've also limited my ordering (somewhat) and strangely have found myself having to "use up" flour before it spoils and wondering how well the left over bottled fruits have kept from 2019.

And yes, I also have a cupboard full of home-made drinks, sloe gin, limoncello, raspberry and rhubarb vodka and beers.
... unlike you, I am not making more!

I don’t think I even know 20 people . And, if I did they wouldn’t want to eat the awful food I produce!

With shops open 24hrs and living alone I have very little food stored. I would probably be ok for 3 days just eating what I have in.

Good grief cooking for 20 I doubt I know 20 people to cook for six is probably the most I ve ever cooked for
I cook for myself and very very occasionally have a couple of family members but that’s it to be sure I have a couple of shelves of tinned /dried food and a fridge freezer rarely with very much in it 2 drawers full in the freezer and very little in the fridge cheese butter eggs and soft drinks that’s about it
Whatever is your food bill for a week of you are catering for so many do you just get people in off the street ???

I m presuming you don’t live in U.K.maybe . and I m presuming you are cooking cleaning washing up as a full time ‘job’ ?
I don’t really like or enjoy being in the kitchen that much cooking, making stuff, washing.up, catering, far too many interesting things to do

We’ve entertained our family when we were allowed during the Covid crisis. So we’ve done garden barbecues, both last summer and this, and when we’re allowed people indoors, we cook for them indoors too, although obviously only six allowed, so one family at a time.

About a month’s worth of dry goods, as Mr. B has been shopping today. Bread, veg, etc. are bought fresh locally.

Last big family get together I cooked for 35 (that was only some of us).
Luckily someone else offered to do all the puds.

Wise words from a friendly acquaintance who was still catering for gatherings in her 80s:
KISS (Keep it simple, stupid).

I had a rural upbringing so we always have a good basic larder plus jams and preserves. And yes, my PYO strawberry jam is made, we've enough to last until next season. Raspberries next.

We no longer grow our own veg so no big freezer. When Covid first struck I had an uncontrolled urge to plant for survival and had veg hidden everywhere in the flower beds. I nearly had to resort to salting down the runner beans the way my DM used to in the days before freezers. Anyone had or remember those revolting salted runner beans?

NfkDumpling

I had a rural upbringing so we always have a good basic larder plus jams and preserves. And yes, my PYO strawberry jam is made, we've enough to last until next season. Raspberries next.

We no longer grow our own veg so no big freezer. When Covid first struck I had an uncontrolled urge to plant for survival and had veg hidden everywhere in the flower beds. I nearly had to resort to salting down the runner beans the way my DM used to in the days before freezers. Anyone had or remember those revolting salted runner beans?

I remember salted beans. Mum used to do then every Autumn in stone wide necked jars. They were just revolting. I expect it was a hangover from WW2 and rural bygone days when food in the Winter May have been in short supply.

We have a normal 50/50 fridge freezer, no space for anything else. Neither of us eat jams, DH doesn’t eat fruit, veg from the allotment, I store potatoes and onions, freeze a little. Shelves in cupboard under the stairs for tins, oil, coffee, tea etc. We’d survive as we eat now for about three weeks, DH is an utter meat eater, he’d struggle after that, tuna pasta maybe ?

To answer some of your questions; we live on the coast in Devon and have an allotment with soft fruit, vegetables and fruit trees (fig, damson, greengage, plum, eating and cooking apples, cherry, pear(s) and elder). I have picked probably 8kg strawberries and 6 kg were turned into strawberry and elderflower jam - there’s probably 4kg more to be picked that will be eaten/frozen.

Our immediate (biological) family is large and visit often (non-COVID times); when my daughter and and granddaughter were visiting home from NZ in 2019 we were mostly a family of 20+ and with friends visiting too we were a very jolly household. We also have foster children and many people for whom we have become their family.

To the person who asked if we gather people in off the streets, yes, we did in fact used to host ‘waifs and strays’ ?, but now that I run a homeless charity it’s rare that I actually bring homeless people home any more, but we do still support a number of people in the community who have no, or limited, support.

Baking and converting our allotment produce into jams, pickles, chutneys etc. is my way of relaxing.

I keep in enough frozen portions, tins and dried goods to last about a month. My job is such that I may not have the time or energy to do a proper shop for a couple of weeks during a busy spell, and I work long hours so I’m often too tired to cook a fresh meal from scratch. A colleague drops off half a dozen eggs from his chickens to my office each week, and I have milk delivered.

When I was incapacitated last autumn for four weeks, I was very pleased with my own foresight.

I live on my own mostly unless my partner or children are visiting. I have minimal amounts of food in the freezer and store cupboard. I always write out a menu for a couple of weeks and buy to that menu. I love to bake and cook and store in the freezer what is left over and factor this into my next menu list.
My mum on the other hand is 80 and has a fridge freezer and separate freezer that are always full. She lives alone. But she always has a joint of meat or fruit for a pie if people visit in the freezer.
I hate waste and hardly throw any food away.

We are usually on a 'replacement' system as described by others but pre-Brexit we had a small panic that DH's favourite muesli might not be available so suddenly had 15 packets of that squirreled away! It then became a Covid 'just in case' stock and we kept the level stocked up, though it is going down to a more normal level now.
We are decluttering my MIL's house and brought home a trophy packet of loo roll this weekend. It had a competition on the side with a closing date of 30th June 1988. We left the other 50+ packets for another day!

Not much, we only have a freezer that’s the bottom half of the fridge, and not a huge amount of cupboard space.

Though having said that, at the beginning of the first lockdown, when supermarket shelves were being stripped bare, I found I could concoct a lot of meals just from what we had. TBH I rather enjoyed using up some well out of date non perishables, e.g. split peas and some GF flour that had been sitting there for ages.
But that was just for me and dh.
I wouldn’t usually have enough of anything to feed more than 2 extra mouths.

Too much, way too much. We could eat well for a couple of months from the contents of our freezers, fridge and store cupboards. Like Esspee, I don’t know why. I guess I’ve got a bit of a siege mentality.

We never waste anything though, ever. All leftovers are used, one way or another.

have found myself having to "use up" flour before it spoils
*NotSpaghetti you can keep flour in the freezer.
In fact, it's quite normal to do that in the tropics.

We usually have enough in for a week, comfortably, at a pinch, if we had to eke it out, probably 2 weeks. I`m not a great fan of cooking, and not really confident enough in my cooking abilities to invite people for meals and I think I`d expire on the spot from shock if told that 20+ were coming to eat!
The most I`ve actually cooked for is 7, and that was before all the kids but one left home.

Callistemon, I always kept flour in the freezer when we lived in the Middle East. It invariably had weevils/and or their larvae in, so the freezer would kill them and I’d then sieve the little corpses out before using it. ?
Or ?, as the case may be.

We had a lot and I had just stocked up when we had a 5 day power cut because of a bad storm and because the electricity companies here are hopeless. We lost the lot so now I’m not going to store so much. As for the insurance companies, don’t get me started …..

Not sure to see us through a famine, that would be dependent on how long it were to last! I started a Brexit cupboard with non perishables, pasta, rice. baked beans etc, that time span seemed to merge with the pandemic. Then when there was a shortage of flour briefly, after which the market became flooded again with the it, I bought some and after complaining to a couple of members of the family about shortages, unbeknown to me they also bought me some, so quite a lot of it now. We moved during lockdown, I brought my old freestanding upright fridge which is in the garage with not a lot in it at the moment. In addition to that. We bought a new fridge freezer for the utility room the freezer half of that is full with meat, fish, frozen veg and a few ice creams for grandchildren visits. The fridge part contains the overspill, I seem to have quite a lot of cheese in it at the moment, we've entertained a couple of times lately and the cheeseboard part of the meal didn't get used up. Plus we have an integrated fridge in the kitchen that has all our day to day stuff in it.

When Covid came along we started to get our food etc. from the Supermarket on delivery if we could, which meant sitting up until 12 pm to get the time we wanted we called it the Thursday night Bingo.
There was a shortage of FLOUR of any kind my husband makes the bread, cleaning products, toilet rolls baking powder you name it. I had not noticed any no substitute box until a friend pointed it out on facetime. I accepted everything.
About two months ago we decided we needed to empty the freezers, so I have planned meals around what we had.
It was only when we had to have a plumber in and he saw the packets of toilet rolls and remarked a "Horder" I realised I had 48 quilted toilet rolls we can not use because of the village drains.
Now we are eating bread from January and the 3-kilo bag of sugar is going down we are getting back to normal.
We know we can get a slot on a morning for the Supermarket and I send back anything they have substituted I do not want, they still do it even if you tick the no box.
I saw a relation for the first time in over a year and they laughed when they saw the state of us and said we were like my mother used to be , stocked as if ww3 was about to start. Four papers off the butter in the fridge waiting to grease tins I always used oil and kitchen paper.
Then they confessed the shed in their garden was full of tinned goods,toilet rolls, kitchen rolls and non-perishables. We are now encouraging each other to use up and I showed them where the no substitute box was.

You are amazing grannyactivist. My solitary life and little store cupboard is light years away from yours.
I did stock up a bit when covid started, but am running it down now.