You'll have to show me the federal law, because we both know your laws are different from mine. This is what I found: "It is important to remember that the Food Code is not a federal law and is provided for non-federal government agencies. It is under the jurisdiction of every state, local, or tribal food safety regulator whether to adapt to or adopt the guidelines in the Food Code.Oct 12, 2022 FDA Food Code - Who Produces the Food Code? - FoodDocs"

I think that the nuances are all getting glazed over, but both you and Thinker are generally correct. 50 USC SS 4512 makes it illegal to collect a large amount of any commodity for the purposes of price gouging. I think the nuance that is missed in that aspect is that there *is* a Federal Registry of the commodities covered under that law, and, although that list is amendable at the government's whim, if you collect the item before the government lists it, the government cannot prosecute you for hoarding it. At the moment, no food items appear on the list, which you can find here: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/03/30/2020-06641/notice-of-designation-of-scarce-materials-or-threatened-materials-subject-to-covid-19-hoarding The second aspect is a little more sticky, and that is executive order. The executive orders in Linda Joy's link do forbid hoarding food, but each calls out specific circumstances that I don't think particularly apply generally to emergency preparedness. The closest you get, in my opinion, is EO 12656-88 that requires government intervention in the case of an emergency in which an organization hoards food and refuses to distribute it to people. Of course, there is nothing in writing to guarantee that the government won't quickly declare that it owns all food in the event of a large-scale emergency, but there's nothing we can do about that except to try to elect better leaders.

They can and do limit how many you can buy at a time. My friend has 6 kids and didn't want to drag them all to the store with her during covid to be allowed to buy enough milk for the family! So I would get some for her since she took me to the store to begin with. But I see the reason behind it. The problem is once government gets power it doesn't like to give it back!

All that and neither one of you answered the question!

Store policy can always be more restrictive than the law. The stores here in northern New England didn't really enforce anything, though.