I was reading through the What food item can’t you do without in your pantry? thread and I got to thinking. Right now, I’m putting myself through an exercise called “You’re too poor to buy anything else, so you’d damned well better start eating some of the food you have in your cupboards/freezer”.
Basically, I’ve been pretty lazy lately when it comes to actually preparing food, and if I don’t have anything handy that will leap out of the fridge and onto my plate, I whine about “not having anything to eat”. This is so totally not true, though. I have tons of food, it just all requires effort. My freezer is full of meat/chicken/fish/frozen veggies. My cupboards are full of canned soups, dried beans and lentils, pasta and sauces, canned tuna, etc.
So, I’m wondering…if I had to, just how long could I keep eating 3x a day without buying any more groceries. I’m not talking balanced meals, or even anything particularly delectable. Just simply how long would it take me to use up everything in the house, assuming I was stranded and couldn’t get out?
The more I think about it, I’m guessing a good month or more. Maybe two.
What about you guys? How long could you go if you were totally cut off from the grocery store as of today?
I’m guessing around 3 weeks till all the food and drinks run out (we don’t have much storage space in our apartment)… but as to how long I’ll survive after that… who knows?
At least a couple of months. And it wouldn’t even be particularly repulsive food, although I would start to miss fresh veggies and dairy products after the first week. I’ve got lots of spices and condiments to jazz up the myriad dried legumes, pasta, and other staples. And as long as I can take my multivitamins, I don’t think I’d even have nutritional issues.
Probably about half a year to a year. Maybe more? My parents buy these enormous 25 kilo bags of rice, and we also have boxes of chinese noodles. Oh, and 3 kilos of chocolate.
I’d say about a week. But by day 3 or 4, I’d be trying to figure out what to do with the can of cream of coconut, jar of mincemeat, and tin of anchovies. I’m not much of a cook.
We’d last about 3 weeks, I think. We don’t really have much in the way of storage space, but I’ve got a freezer full of chicken and several pounds of rice and pasta. I would, though, start to miss fresh veggies, milk, and bread rather quickly.
I think I would go with a month. I have a bunch of canned veggies and soups, and I just stocked my freezer with meats and stuff. Although I do have some weird items hanging around in there, like a can of hearts of palm. I can’t figure out what they were bought for, or when I was ever going to use them.
At least a couple of months—probably 3 or even 4. I even have dehydrated carrots! We’d be living on mostly beans, wheat, and macaroni after a while, though.
We need a chest freezer and I need to start canning more. genie starts plotting to get more food
Hmm… If I absolutely had to I could probably go a month. I’d have to get rather creative with the spices towards the end of that, as I would have run out of onions before then, which are useful for providing flavour. However I have probably got about 5kg of rice, approaching 3kg of split red lentils, and another 2kg of other miscellaneous dried beens and lentils numerous canned beans. I know I have at least a kilogram of cous cous around somewhere, possibly more. Various other random things.
Hmm…
I have quite a lot of food come to think of it. Make that two months. Maybe even three, but I’d have to start getting creative for the third. Exactly how creative depends on whether our oven gets fixed before then…
One of the perks of being effectively vegetarian - lots of compact, easily storable, food (without having to use a freezer that is).
Hmmm. Probably about 3 weeks. After that, I’d be flat out miserable. Almost all of my food is fresh (except for some frozen chicken) so 3 weeks would really be about my upper limit.
A week, maybe two. We tend to buy week-by-week, and we don’t have a lot of storage space, so there isn’t much lying around that doesn’t get eaten anyways. We are pretty good about buying only what we eat, and the only things that seem to stick around from one grocery run to another is the odd can of soup. This is, of course, assuming no one is expecting us to finish all the ketchup/mustard/BBQ sauce/spices etc.
How long can a person survive without food again, isn’t it a week or so?
I mean, I have condiments out the wazoo, so I guess I can go figure how many calories there are in half a bottle of ketchup (gag), or start eating salsa with a spoon but atm my pantry is a can of cream of something soup, and some raisin bran (I’m out of milk though). The fridge…I think I have some yoghurt.
OK, what I want to know is if this is your normal culinary staples list (in which case I will not be joining you for a meal any time soon) or is this is the result of being on vacation, going on vacation, being an “eat out all the time” kind of person…
And may I also say that canned mackerel is a horrible thing? 'Cause I’d really like to point that out.
Me, I could live for a while. I figure between the stuff in my cupboards/freezer and the nutrients naturally stored in my hind end, I’m good for a year at least.
Make that two months. Maybe even three, but I’d have to start getting creative for the third. Exactly how creative depends on whether our oven gets fixed before then…
: