How long could you go without renewing your larder?

Let’s assume your food source was cut off. Given the current state of your in-house larder and the current occupants, how long could you survive without being dangerously hungry?

I’m considering all usable foodstuffs in the house – frozen, canned, dried, and/or in a root cellar. You have electricity and/or gas for cooking, no heat or cooling problems. You have a water source, so you can make bread if you have flour & yeast; you can open a can; you can raid your root cellar for potatoes, onions, and tomatoes. But you can’t visit a supermarket, milk a cow, dig a carrot, or pick anything from your trees or harvest from your garden.

How long could you last without major suffering?

Probably a week or so. But that could probably be extended quite a bit if I get into the cat/dog food…or eat the cats and dogs.

Probably a month given I have electricity. If there wasn’t power, I would be eating margarine on Day Two.

Oooo…I didn’t consider cat/dog food – I don’t have any cats/dogs, jut mice…but I was thinking mostly about food that you might not consider otherwise.

Like…I have crackers and canned stuff that’s been around for years. Maybe it’s time to trash stuff like that, but what if?..is what’s keeping me from cleaning out the larder. Your never know when a nuclear war or an asteroid strike might happen.

Not long. I live a block away from the supermarket, so there’s no real need to keep anything in the house.

I could probably stretch it to 14 days, but that would take some serious rationing. I don’t buy in bulk and I try to eat mainly fresh foods.

Between the larder and the actual lard I have “stored,” probably a year.

If I carefully ration it? A month, maybe. If I eat just like I normally do under the assumption that the stores well reopen any day now? Two weeks, maybe.

A couple weeks.

We could survive for several months I suppose, maybe as much as six. I would really miss dairy products after a few weeks though.

I have over 100 pounds of meat, poultry, and fish in the freezer, probably over 75 pounds of flour and other grain products and plenty of yeast to turn them into bread, quite a lot of dry beans, peas, and lentils, 15 or 20 pounds of peanut oil, and a modest selection of canned goods, frozen fruits and vegetables, and dried fruit. I also have quite a lot of vitamin pills so micronutrient deficiency shouldn’t be a big problem. There’s more than enough liquor and wine to have at least a serving or two a day and enough coffee to last three or four months.

I’m not a survivalist or anything. I’m just cheap. I tend to buy in bulk and stock up when things are on sale. In fact, I’ve been trying to cut back on purchases lately. There’s too much food in the house and I’m concerned we won’t be able to eat it all before it goes bad.

Wow, bib, I’m coming over for dinner!

Well, small potatoes compared to above but probably about six weeks, although, at the end of the first month I’d be eating unleavened bread.

It’s most affordable to buy staples in bulk, so got a 10 kg bag of brown rice, 10 lbs basmati, 18 kg’s flour, 10 kgs brown sugar and cornmeal, 10 lbs of pancake mix, chickpeas, potatoes and onions, frozen vegetables. Probably about 25 lbs of different meats. Right now is one of the times where the stars are an alignment, and most bags are >85% full.

Salt, sugar, coffee, chia, walnuts, probably 5 lb bags/cans of each.

Things like vinegar, soy, I buy the 2-4L jugs, that’ll help jazz things up a little, lots of 1L bottles of various sauces, hot, worcestershire, etc.

Would hurt for dairy and produce pretty quickly, as I tend to get fresh ingredients every other day or so.

Just posed the question to Mrs. Bays, she said ‘about a month, but we’d be on a diet.’

Cool thread :smiley:

About two months. There have been periods in which I couldn’t drive, for medical reasons, so I couldn’t go shopping. And my husband hates to shop; he’d rather starve than go food shopping. So now I stock up on everything. We have a refrigerator-size freezer in the basement, and a food locker with lots of canned goods, etc.

From past experience, I’d miss fresh produce.

A couple of weeks easy. But we just moved, and I haven’t had a chance to restock the usual pantry, which would get us up to a couple of months. We’d run out of cat food before we’d run out of people food. That would be the problem - the cats already look at me as a food source. :slight_smile:

At least a couple of weeks at normal daily consumption, more like a month probably. I always make sure I have plenty of rice, flour, pasta, beans, and there is a variety of meat portions in the freezer to easily last a month. I use up a gallon of milk a month, so on average I have enough on hand to last 2-3 weeks. Most things get written on my grocery list when I’m down to about a 2-weeks supply.

Off the top of my head? 3 months, maybe more. I probably have at least 10# each of dried beans and rice, a freezer full of meat (including most of a half a pig I bought around Christmas), and a cupboard full of canned goods and several pounds of dried pasta. That last month might not be tasty, but we won’t go hungry.

Can we hunt and/or trap? There’s a lot of mighty fat squirrels and a lot of deer out back :smiley:

Oh, and… a wine cellar and a pretty good beer fridge and liquor cabinet. Not especially nutritious, but it’ll stave off that boredom that last month of eating nothing but plain pasta and all those black ants that show up this time of year.

Up until last month, I could have held out for around a month. I had a well-stocked freezer in my basement plus a lot of stuff in my regular freezer. Then I lost my power for a week and everything had to be thrown out.

We lived off the larder for two weeks and didn’t even make a dent. But my parents were much more organized than my wife is. They bought food in bulk to save shopping trips, bought only what they used, and used what they bought. Here, we’d stop when the refrigerator ran out.

My count would be inflated by several days’ worth of Twizzlers that I bought for almost nothing off the grocery store’s clearance rack.

I just went shopping and that should last 2-3 weeks as is. Then with various other junk in the house and rationing myself probably 3 more weeks or a month.

I don’t eat very much and as long as I can keep my blood sugar up I’m good to go.

This thread was suggested by a recent week where I didn’t visit the store except for milk and eggs.

I realized that I could eat comfortably for quite a while with what was in the house. A week? No problem.

I only have a small chest freezer plus the small freezer compartment in the apartment-sized fridge. Quite a few canned goods in the basement, and I keep potatoes, onions in a cold, but not frozen, place that the mice don’t get to.

If I were starving, there are some boxes of stuff in the larder that have been there for years. Edible? Depends on how starving you are.

Right now, the bigger problem is forgetting something at the back of the fridge until it’s waaaay past expiration date. I try to force myself to inventory the box at least once a week, whether I’m hungry or not. If it rots, it seems so wasteful and un-holy.