When it’s over

Every disruption ends. The power comes back. The taps run clear. The shops restock and the road reopens and the week after that, it is mostly a story you tell.

Almost nothing written about emergencies covers that morning. The official guidance takes you up to the event and stops. So does most of what you will find online, and so, until now, did this site.

That is a strange gap, because the morning after is when people throw away food that was perfectly good, drink water they should have run off first, and spend money they have not got replacing things they already own.

Here is what to do.

First, check what you still have

Do this before you write a shopping list. Most of what you think you lost, you probably did not.

If the power was off.

Keep the doors shut, and open the freezer last rather than first.

If the cut lasted under four hours, the Food Standards Agency’s position is that your chilled and frozen food is unlikely to have been affected at all. For most power cuts that is the whole answer — go straight down to the restocking and leave the rest of this section be.

Longer than that, and the working figures are: a fridge stays cold for about four hours, a full freezer keeps food frozen for up to forty-eight, and a half-empty one for around twenty-four. Treat those as estimates rather than promises. They move with the make of the appliance, how full it was, how warm the room is, and how many times somebody opened the door to have a look.

When you do open it, anything still frozen solid is fine and goes straight back in. Anything that has thawed should be treated as fridge food from that moment on — cook it and eat it rather than putting it back in the freezer.

The fridge is the more delicate case. During a power cut the FSA will accept fridge food kept under 8°C, but once it has been sitting at 8°C or above, eat the things that normally live in the fridge within four hours, and eat them first. The cupboard can wait. Tins, dried goods and anything that normally sits at room temperature are unaffected by any of this and will still be there tomorrow.

And one thing almost nobody thinks of.

If it is properly cold outside — below 8°C — you can move fridge food out there. In a sealed box, out of direct sunlight, somewhere no animal can get at it. For a good part of the Scottish year that is a free fridge sitting just past your back door.

Do not taste anything to check. Taste tells you nothing useful about the bacteria that matter, and it puts the thing you are unsure about directly in your mouth.

If you are unsure about a particular food, the Food Standards Agency is the authority. Check with them rather than take our word for it.

If the water was off.

Run the cold tap for a few minutes before you drink or cook with anything. Water coming back into an empty pipe pushes sediment ahead of it, so discoloured or cloudy water at first is common and usually harmless — but wait until it runs clear. Run it through before you fill the kettle, before you fill a pan, and before you fill the pet bowl.

If your supplier has issued a boil-water notice, keep boiling until they tell you to stop. Not until the water looks right — until they say so. That is their call and they will make it publicly.

If neither was off,

and this was a supply problem rather than a utility one — empty shelves, a road shut, a week you could not get to a shop — then your food is fine and your water is fine, and that is genuinely the end of this section for you. Put anything you decanted back into something sealed, check the dates on whatever you opened, and go on to the next part. Restocking is the whole of your job.

Then restock, in this order

Not everything at once. In order, so that if you have to stop partway you have stopped in the right place.

1. Water. Whatever you drank, drank down or poured away. It is the cheapest thing on the list and the first thing you would miss.
2. The staples you actually ate. Not the ones you meant to eat. Rice, pasta, oats, tins, whatever came out of the cupboard first. Those are the things that earn their place, and they are the cheapest calories you can buy.
3. The one thing that ran out. There is nearly always one, and it is nearly always small. Tea, salt, milk of some kind, the cooking oil. Write it down now, while you are still annoyed about it, because in a fortnight you will have forgotten.
4. Everything else, whenever. Over the next few normal shops. There is no rush and there is no prize for finishing this week.

If money is tighter after this than it was before — and for a lot of households it will be, because disruptions cost — then work down that list and stop where you need to stop. A partly restocked cupboard is not a failed one. It is a cupboard with the important part done.

Our planner will do the sums again if it helps. If you are rebuilding on less than you had, the cheapest-possible plan will tell you the floor for your household rather than asking you for a budget you may not have.

Now write down what you learned

This is the part that only you can do, and the part that makes the next one easier. It takes five minutes and it is worth more than anything else on this page.

Three questions:

What ran out first?

That is the thing you keep more of next time. Not more of everything — more of that.

What did you never touch?

If it sat there all week, it is not a food you eat under pressure, whatever it says on the tin. Swap it for something you will.

What did you wish you had?

Not a fantasy list. The specific, ordinary, slightly embarrassing thing you kept reaching for and not finding. This is usually where the equipment turns up rather than the food — the torch with dead batteries in it, the tin opener you were sure you had two of.

Write the answers on the back of your build-up schedule, or on anything you will find again, and pin it inside the cupboard door. We do not store this for you and never will — it is yours, it lives in your house, and it is more use there than it would ever be on our server.

Rotate. Do not rebuild.

The mistake after a disruption is to buy a big pile of long-life food, put it at the back of the cupboard, feel prepared, and then find it four years later, out of date, having eaten none of it.

The cupboard that works is the one you are always eating. Use the oldest tins and packets first, replace them on your normal shop, and let the whole thing turn over slowly. That way nothing expires, nothing is wasted, and you never have to do a big frightening restock again — including after the next disruption, whenever that is.

Start this week. If you already have a build-up schedule, rotate from that. If you do not — and if this was your first disruption, you almost certainly do not — then pull the three oldest tins or packets out of the back of the cupboard and eat them before Sunday. That is the habit. There is nothing more to it than that.

If you want it laid out week by week from there, the build-up schedule does exactly this, and you can print it.

Do this today

• Check the freezer before you throw anything away — if it is still frozen solid, it is fine.
• Run the cold tap until it runs clear.
• Write down the one thing that ran out first.
• Buy that one thing.

That is the whole job. The rest can wait for a normal week.