Solar Oven
A solar oven consists of solar panels and a black pot that holds your food. The solar panels trap the heat and direct it to the pot. It doesn’t require any fuel other than the sun, but if it’s a cold or overcast day, it won’t be effective enough to cook with.
Rocket Stove
A rocket stove is a small, single-burner stove that uses wood to efficiently trap heat in a high-temperature combustion chamber. The smaller ones are portable, but you’ll need wood to fuel them.
Volcano Stove
These are wonderful gadgets to keep in your emergency kit because they’re light, portable, self-contained, and extremely efficient. You can use wood, charcoal, or propane, and many of them already have racks on them. The concept is that the heat is funneled directly to the food instead of being lost to the environment.
Stove in a Can
These amazing little tools are lightweight and easy to throw into your bug-out bag or emergency kit. They’re simply little heat cells that you place in the bottom of a can to convert it into a stove.
Alternative Food Sources
There are several different sources from which you can gather foodstuffs for your emergency food supply, but the most important thing to remember is that you need to rotate your emergency food supply. The best way to do that is to use your emergency supply as part of your usual food stores. You shouldn’t be stocking your pantry with foods that you wouldn’t eat anyway; make your emergency supply a larger version of what you already buy, with perhaps just a little more emphasis on canned proteins such as tuna and chicken.
One thing that you’ll need to remember, however, is the idea that sugar and excess calories are always bad. In an emergency situation, you’re going to need calorie-dense foods in order to meet your energy requirements, because you may not be eating three to five low-calorie meals per day. You may need to get all of your energy from one or two food bars.
The Value of Condiments
Imagine how much easier it would be to live on canned chicken for a week if you had some mayonnaise, canned gravy, mustard, teriyaki sauce, and maybe some pickle relish. Condiments can make all of the difference in the world and they’re cheap. They will also be great barter items because everybody is going to be sick of eating plain meat and vegetables. Seasonings will also make your life easier and will be valuable, so don’t forget them when you’re building your stockpile.
Commercially Preserved Foods
The idea of starting your supply may seem daunting, but it’s actually quite easy. Just buy a little bit extra each time that you go to the store. It doesn’t even have to be much. Start with buying two cans of chicken broth or tuna instead of one. It’s that easy; but of course, if you can buy more, then your supply would build faster.
Be careful when you buy commercially canned or boxed foods because they’re often full of salt and preservatives. Also, remember that you can’t go by the serving size listed on the can or box. You know your appetite and that of your family. If each of you can eat a can of tuna, then use an entire can as one serving when you’re doing your planning.
If you use coupons and take advantage of buy-one-get-one-free sales at the grocery store, you can build your emergency supply fairly inexpensively and quickly.
Meals Ready to Eat (MREs)
originally created by the military, these are vacuum-packed meals that are ready to eat right out of the package. These can range from single-food meals such as green beans to full meals such as lasagna. In recent years, technology has even advanced to the point where these meals heat themselves via a chemical reaction with just a few spoonfuls of water dropped in the outside layer of the pack. These are great for your bug-out bag because they’re light and generally packed with nutrients and calories.
Meal-Replacement Bars
You’ve seen them in the supermarkets and convenience stores, and you’ve probably even had at least one meal-replacement bar in your life. They’re a great food for your bug-out bag because they’re portable, macronutrient-rich, and easy to eat on the run. They also don’t weigh much or take up much space. As with all processed foods, watch the sodium content so they don’t make you thirsty.
Home-Canned Foods
Preserving foods via canning has been practiced for centuries, and it simply involves heating the food to a temperature that kills all harmful bacteria and pushes air out of the jar so that harmful bacteria can’t grow inside of the jar. There are three primary ways to can foods: water bath (or boiling water) canning, pressure canning, and dry canning. The first two are by far the most common, but all three methods are reviewed in this book, accompanied by some fabulous recipes.
Dehydrated Foods
This process involves removing the water from produce and meats to greatly reduce the rate of spoilage. Once the water is out of the food, it can be dry-canned or vacuum-packed and kept for years without losing much of the nutritional value. You can dehydrate foods fairly easily at home using a food dehydrator that costs very little. But try to get one with heat settings so you can dry foods at the temperatures recommended for best results. Dehydrated foods can be rehydrated in a few hours by soaking the food in water or another liquid.
Freeze-Dried Foods
This is a fairly expensive process because of the equipment required, so most people just buy freeze-dried foods. It involves instantly flash-freezing the food so it remains in basically the same nutritional state that it was in prior to being freeze-dried. You lose very little of the nutritional value when you freeze-dry food.
Vacuum-Packed Foods
Vacuum-packing involves sealing a food product in plastic that has had all of the air sucked out of it. Spoilage can still occur, however, and if a food required refrigeration prior to being vacuum-packed, it will still need to be refrigerated after vacuum-packing.
These are the most common methods of preparing foods for long-term storage. Canning and dehydrating will be discussed more in depth over the next several chapters.
Building Your Bug-Out Bag
If your house was on fire, a flood was coming, or another event requiring you to leave quickly occurred, wouldn’t it be good to have all of your important documents and some emergency items altogether in one spot where you could quickly grab them? Of course it would, and that’s exactly what a bug-out bag is: a bag that’s already packed with vital items and a small supply of food in case you need to “bug out” in a hurry. You may hear this emergency bag referred to by the following names:
72-hour bag
GOOD (Get out of Dodge) bag
Go bag
PERK (Personal Emergency Relocation Kit)
