After a week, we’d be out of fresh meat and vegetables.
After two weeks, we’d be out of frozen and canned vegetables too.
We could probably make the frozen meat supplies last for about a month if we were careful.
After that point we’d be living on peanut butter, dry cereal, beans, and taco seasoning packets. I think that would last us another couple of weeks with careful rationing, but with 5 people it’d go pretty quickly.
The only measure that really matters is how much chocolate I have on hand.
I voted “a month” because I have rice and pasta and dry goods like that, but not an extensive pantry. I’ve always wondered at the reports on tv about people rushing out to clean out the grocery stores the second some weather comes in - we get bad winter storms here, but we just don’t do that. If you live some place that gets serious weather, are people really in danger of starving if they can’t get to the grocery store for a couple of days? Or is it just part of the local “batten down the hatches” response?
As a un-married young male living alone with little cooking skills, I must say my pantry is embarrassingly ill-stocked. I do have a steady supply of bread and bananas though for emergency snack cravings.
We could easily last a month or two on what’s in the basement freezer and food locker. Cat and dog food too.
We shop for about two week’s worth of meals at a time and could crib together less enjoyable meals (frozen veggies, no fresh, etc.) for another 3-4 days after that if we had to, but rarely would we want to.
I used to keep a month’s supply of dog food on hand at all times, but now that my dog is in iffy old age, I’m buying about 10 days worth at a time.
Except for perishables, I’m probably good for a couple of months. This doesn’t stop me from shopping every week to take advantage of sales, although now I have to remind myself that that freezer is packed solid so I shouldn’t buy any more meat or anything else that needs to go in there.
We have plenty of dry goods, but we don’t have room in the house to store more than 3-4 days worth of milk, orange juice, bread, and yogurt. I’ve definitely been in the “OMG, snow!” grocery store lines, but then again, I go to the store 3-4 times a week as it is. Also, one of the fun things about living in the DC suburbs is that our power company is a touch unreliable. We don’t tend to keep much that we can’t eat in the 24-36 hours after the power goes out, although that’s more a summertime problem than a winter one.
Hahaha really? I thought this was unique to our house! (Un-married female and un-married male)
We will always be ready to fend off an army of monkeys and ducks.
I voted “Slim,” not because that’s my personal preference but rather a practical matter of economics, transportation, and storage space.
If I had a car and made more money, I’d do what my parents did growing up which was to buy non-perishables whenever they were on sale no matter what it was and pile it up on shelves in the basement and just make quick trips once a week for perishables. However since there’s only enough money in my budget for a week’s worth of food at a time, I can only buy as much as I can carry home at any one time, and my kitchen is tiny, there’s typically not a whole lot of food sitting around my house.
Right at this moment, it’s about a week’s worth.
We just bought a freezer and a quarter of a steer for Christmas, though, and with the extra freezer space we’re going to ramp up our garden this summer. Ask us again in a few months…
There’s probably enough to last at least a couple weeks. Might run a little low on the beer and wine front though 
We use coupons and shop sales so we’re stocked pretty deep in some areas. We could definitely eat for a few weeks, but by the end of that we’d be repeating a lot and our meals wouldn’t be all that balanced.
We had a two day power outage last winter and we had plenty to eat but were really unprepared in other ways. Since then I’ve been working on improving our emergency preparedness.
Right now, only about a month. We moved in November, and had been eating out of the pantry and freezer for a few months before that, only getting perishables like milk and eggs and fresh veggies. So our pantry and freezer aren’t stocked nearly as well as I’d like. Generally I have about half a year’s worth of food, because I tend to do things like make two or three lasagnas or meatloaf pans, and stick the extra in the deep freeze. Why not? It’s only slightly more trouble to make more of these foods, and the larger packs of meat are cheaper per pound than the smaller packs.
One of the great secrets to eating a healthy diet, in my opinion, is having a healthy pantry. It’s a LOT easier to whip up a tasty, healthy meal if you don’t have to spend an hour at the store and a lot of money buying every single ingredient.
I cook as a hobby and have a house that’s waaay too large for two people, and my parents gave me a full size standup freezer a few years ago. As a result, I’m good for at least a few months, except for veggies and other perishables. I’m lousy at keeping frozen veggies around because I really don’t like them.
At any given time, I’m sure I have most of:
Meat (frozen): a couple beef chuck roasts, probably some pork shoulder roasts, a variety of chicken parts (breasts/thighs), a whole chicken or two, a whole duck or two, several pounds of homemade sausage, pancetta, 2 or 3 varieties of terrines, and maybe even some frozen fish or shellfish. Maybe some steaks or pork chops.
Frozen stock: Chicken stock, smokey chicken stock, beef stock, veal stock, veal glace, duck glace, fish glace, chicken glace. Various packages of frozen bones to make more of all of those.
Pantry basics: flour, sugar, masa, corn meal, leaveners, several dozen dried herbs & spices, dried beans, 3-5 pounds dried pasta, 10+ pounds rice, lots of olive oil, canola oil, various vinegars.
Canned goods: canned tomatoes, beans, and corn. Several varieties of salsas and sauces. I love those little cans of Mexican hot yum-yums.
In the fridge at any given time: a couple dozen eggs, a variety of cheeses (always Parmesan, cheddar, and Gruyere, along with more exotics like brie or Mobiere for snacking), milk, condiments, cooking wine (which is just leftover drinking wine), salami, ham, bacon, celery, carrots, leeks.
Non-fridged perishables: garlic, onions, maybe some winter squash, fruit like bananas or apples. More variety of these in the summer.
And of course a variety of wine, beer, and hard liquor, because you have to have something to drink with all that!
We do major shopping every other week, and could probably take a couple of weeks off, but no one would be happy with what we were eating by the end of it. We don’t usually immediately go for the kinds of food like dry pasta, or canned goods, but we do have enough of them to feed the household for about a week, after we finished off the fresh and frozen things, if we had to.
I gave up reading about half way through, but yeah, the fresh stuff would be gone after a week, but we would be comfortable for probably a month. Unless we ran out of toilet paper. I’m sure we could improvise though, but I really don’t want to dwell on how.
I’d be climbing the walls without fresh veggies after a week. He’d be fine for 3 weeks; he loves frozen veggies. But easily we could survive 3 weeks. We have cupboards and a waist-high bookshelf and a stocked fridge.
In the 4 years I’ve been in my neighborhood, we’ve had 3 water main breaks. After the first one I learned to have 2 gallons of water on hand; sometimes it takes them awhile to fix the breaks, and the extra water can be used to flush the toilet. So during the 2nd water main break I ran to CVS for water. Got some of the last of it, too.
I picked “other”, because I don’t have the most organized pantry in town. Mostly I stock up on staples when they’re on sale. We don’t have as much freezer space as I’d like so we don’t have a lot in terms of frozen veggies and meats, though, again, that depends on when I last stocked up. We could probably eat for at least a week even if we got caught out the day before I did the weekly grocery run, but I sure hope we’ll never have to! Meals would get really weird…
So much of my food intake is based on milk - cereal, processed foods (like mac & cheese) that require milk, etc. - that if a geniunely debilitating snowstorm were in the forecast I would probably do well to head to the grocery store and grab a couple of gallons.
Otherwise, yeah I could probably last a week or two until my cupboards were completely bare and I had literally nothing to eat.
But seriously, Springfield is well-equipped for snow emergencies. Worst-case scenario is that I’m stuck at home for a few hours at most.