I think what parent is saying is that buying that much food "just in case" and then having to buy generator backup because you now have such an investment in that food is expensive insurance. Personally, I did buy some extra frozen food early on when grocery stores were pretty wiped out but nothing remotely like that.

What makes me periodically think about a generator is a sustained outage in freezing temperatures in winter. Given that more or less the worst that can happen in summer is I have to throw out a bunch of food, I'm not sure the generator makes sense.