When All Hell Breaks Loose: Stuff You Need to Survive When Disaster Strikes

by Cody Lundin

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  Due to its weight and bulk, it would be suicide to pack the above-mentioned two-burner stove in case of a hasty evacuation. Miniature backpacking stoves are cool when weight and space are at a premium, but their smallness and one-burner capacity make them a poor choice to use for a family of any size. Picture the size of the pot that it would take to feed your family, and then picture it sitting on the dainty, unstable single burner. Their scaled-down size makes them a pain in the ass to use on a regular basis and the teetering pot perched atop the engineering marvel can easily be toppled by kids, pets, or inclement weather, increasing fire danger if used in your home. Rabid designers may be able to make a cell phone smaller, but who cares if your fingers are too fat to make a call. Backpacking stoves are also expensive in comparison to larger two-burner models and you may be forced to endure elitist snobbery from sales people at high-end outdoor stores when deciding which God's-gift-to-ultralight-stoves to choose.

  The most common camping or backpacking stoves burn white gas or propane, although some burn alcohol (such as homemade stoves that can be created from an aluminum pop can) and even sticks and leaves. As described in the lighting chapter, white gas is more hazardous to store and not as neat as propane, as it can be easily spilled. Having a stove that runs on the same fuel as your alternative lighting options is a wise choice, be it white gas or propane canisters. Whatever fuel you choose, pack away extra for a rainy day in a safe location.

  Even though newer camping and backpacking stoves have a warning on the package about using them indoors due to concerns about carbon monoxide poisoning, it's fine to have them in your kitchen to prepare food. If you live in a dollhouse covered with plastic wrap or your shelter or kitchen area is tight, crack a window when utilizing the stove to allow fresh air to enter the room and always use them on a stable, noncombustible surface. For God's sake, don't bring the stove into your home with the intention of using it to heat your house. Cooking, yes. Heating? Absolutely not!

  Other Food Cooking Alternatives

  Charcoal and Barbeque Grills

  Kiss the cook! Dad will have a blast cooking up survival meals just like he does in the summertime with his famous hamburger cookouts. Most barbeque grills run on propane tanks and will last a surprising amount of time depending on what you cook. Many grills have a side burner perfect for heating up items in pots. I love my outdoor propane barbeque grill and use it mainly when I entertain company or for quickly cooking up rodents and rabbits without having to hassle with a fire pit.

  Due to their shape and volume, spherical-shaped charcoal grills allow you to easily use almost anything that will burn as a fuel source long after the briquettes run out. They're basically a fire pit with wheels, ending the need for you to bend over your fire pit to cook your food or disinfect your water. Caution! Carbon monoxide fumes from charcoal briquettes have killed people who brought the grill inside for warmth during power outages, so use caution and common sense. AT NO TIME should a charcoal briquette- fueled barbeque grill be brought into or near the house. If necessary, reread about carbon monoxide poisoning on Chapter 12.

  Mini-stoves with Fuel Tablets

  Some cooking stoves are nothing more than a collapsible metal grate in which hexamine tablets are placed underneath to heat whatever. They're neat and will simmer water in your Sierra cup, but they could cause vexed family members to bludgeon you to death as they painfully wait for their tepid dinner, one cup at a time. They would be useful if you are forced to hit the road due to an evacuation.

  Candles

  Although slow and tedious, with patience, a simple candle flame can heat up many foods. Canned foods can be opened, the paper label peeled off if necessary, and the can set directly upon an improvised fireproof grate over a candle flame.

  Woodstoves

  Many woodstoves feature a flat area on top of the stove that's perfect as a cooking surface. The main drawback with using a woodstove to cook or heat food is that it's in your house. If your emergency happens in the middle of July, it's doubtful you'll fancy firing up the stove to heat the survival beans when it's 95 degrees F (35 degrees C) outside.

  Fireplaces

  Any Hollywood movie depicting medieval times has a shot of the family fireplace in which all meals are prepared and cooked. With a metal pot and grate, matches, firewood, and ingenuity, you'll quickly learn what works best if you choose to incorporate your home's fireplace as part of your kitchen cookery. Fire safety from neglected chimneys is of prime importance so reread the alternative heating section on Chapter 12.

  Campfires

  There are many, many variations of campfire lays in regard to how things are set up to cook food with fire. Radiant flame contains the most heat but the smoldering coals provide a more even heat without scorching. Until you get a cooking system down, your metal pot will drive you mad as it will either be too far from the heat source and will take forever to warm up or suffocate the fire of oxygen by being too close. Every year I watch my students from urban backgrounds attempt to cook their food over an open fire in the wilderness. It's comical and somewhat pathetic at first, but by dinner on the third night they're almost pros at getting the fire and pot to bend to their will for great results. If you're subjected to using an open campfire to cook your food, go slow, use common sense, and have patience with yourself and others. Things will only get better with practice. When building a fire outside, do it away from buildings and don't build it under a carport, as heat and sparks can easily start a house fire. Learn how to start a fire safely—don't use gasoline to get a wood or charcoal fire started.

  Some camp cooking fires are built on the ground and others are raised up to eliminate bending over. Outdoor cooking options can be quite elaborate and include earth or rock ovens, pit baking, flat stone griddles, green stick grills, clay baking, and more. In each instance, their commonality is how to most effectively and efficiently get the heat to the food. The problem with an open fire, especially in the wind, is that only a small percentage of its heat reaches the container to cook the food. The rest is lost to the environment.

  You can suspend a metal pot with a handle over fire or coals using sticks, dig a narrow trench that allows a fire underneath, or have the pot sit on rocks, among many other variations. Open fires have a way of trashing cook pots by turning them permanently black, so be warned. If you lack a noncombustible container or heavy-duty tinfoil, which is hard to imagine in an urban setting, food can be stone boiled in a variety of otherwise combustible containers. I routinely "stone boil" food such as clams, crayfish, beans, or corn in gourd pots using rocks that were heated in a fire. Indigenous peoples used tightly woven baskets, wooden containers, and animal parts to achieve the same means. Rocks gathered from low-lying areas, whether the stones were in water or not, should be heated up carefully, as the trapped water within the rock can rapidly expand and cause the rock to explode when heated.

  Canned foods can be opened and put directly into a bed of coals or near the fire; occasionally stir the contents with a spoon or stick so it doesn't scorch. Food products such as ashcakes, described on Chapter 12, can be put directly onto the hot coals or skewered and suspended on sticks like you did with marshmallows and weenies when you were a kid. Whatever method you choose, there is no escaping the fact that the more you know about how fire works, the easier (and safer) it will be to cook your food using its power.

  Be Fire Safe!

  Make sure any fire is well contained. Strong winds can blow embers into dry grass or other fuels and have your neighborhood go up in smoke quickly. Many idiot campers put massive fuel on a tiny heat base and then fight over the sitting area that's not smoking like crazy. You don't need a huge white-man fire to cook your lentils. It wastes fuel, attracts attention, creates a terrible fire danger, and burns food and people, as it's too damn hot to get near to stir the beans.

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  IN THE KITCHEN, SIZE DOES MATTER

  Whole grains and legumes should be left whole until d
ays or hours before cooking, as this ensures the least amount of oxidation to damage the food's nutritional value. To save time, water, and fuel, these food types should be broken up before cooking to allow the greater surface area to speed up the cooking process. The perfect tool for this is the manual food grinder or grain mill. There are many varieties to choose from in all different qualities. Buy the best, most simple hand-crank mill you can afford and it will give you a lifetime of service.

  A low-tech alternative is to create a mano and metate from rocks in your backyard. A veritable prehistoric grain mill used for thousands of years, the mano is the grinding stone you hold in your hand(s) and the metate is the larger stone surface that you grind upon. Many authentic metates have deep depressions worn into them by years of faithful service. I have made quickie mano and metate sets on the fly during wilderness courses to pulverize or grind up corn or mesquite pods for easier cooking and digestion.

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  I usually dig a rectangular trench about six inches deep to put my fires in and use the earth to build up a small embankment around the fire. This trench is dug in mineral earth, free from roots and other combustibles underground. Fire pits encircled with rocks turn into trash cans in the woods, but if you have to use rocks to contain your fire, do so. In an urban setting, bricks or concrete blocks work great. Some people use metal drums or charcoal grills to build their fires.

  Be sure to properly extinguish any fire when you are through with it. All parts of the fire, including the black carbon, should be cool to the touch. Remember the fire triangle: heat, fuel, and oxygen. Remove any one of them and the fire goes out. The easiest way to put out your fire in low- or no-water situations is to burn very small fuelwood and let it burn out. In other words, think ahead about when you want the fire out and STOP ADDING FUEL!

  The Dutch Oven

  In the hands of experienced people, Dutch ovens are capable of cooking nearly anything, from stews to chocolate cakes. All they require is food, fuel, and someone who knows what they're doing. Many Dutch oven artists like the model with three or four metal legs and a lid with a rim around its circumference. These design features allow for the easy distribution of hot coals under and on top of the oven for heat to evenly penetrate and cook the meal inside.

  Pressure Cookers

  Pressure cookers make short work of hard-to-cook survival fare foods such as rice or beans, saving fuel, time, and water. When foods are stored for long periods of time, they will become slightly tougher and harder to cook, hence the virtues of the pressure cooker. There are many cheap ones on the market (some of which have exploded under the pressure!), and some of the best to be found are lingering on a back shelf at the thrift store. My grandmother could work magic with her pressure cooker and I fondly remember its "rattle and hiss" that inevitably meant something tasty would be on the table soon. Purchase a quality pressure cooker as you'll have it for life.

  Solar Ovens

  According to one source, the first formal solar cooker was developed in 1767 by Horace de Saussure, a Swiss naturalist. Since the sun has been drying people's food for thousands of years, my guess is that the sun was being used to cook food much earlier than this; we have yet to find the proof.

  I absolutely adore my solar oven. I can cook almost anything and during the summer months my oven can get to temperatures of 375 degrees F (191 degrees C) in less than half an hour—all with the free power of the sun. How hot a solar cooker gets is primarily determined by the number and size of the reflectors used and, of course, the sun's intensity and its duration. High temperatures are not required for cooking and food will cook just fine as long as the oven reaches about 200 degrees F (90 degrees C). Foods containing water can't go above 212 degrees F (100 degrees C) at sea level anyway, unless a pressure cooker is used. High temperatures in cookbooks are for the sake of convenience and to achieve effects on food such as browning. Lower temperatures allow foods to cook slower, like in a crockpot, so people can do other things and come back to a hot meal. Higher oven temperatures cook food faster, in larger quantities, and give your oven a boost during partly cloudy or hazy days.

  There are three basic types of solar cookers: box cookers, panel cookers, and parabolic cookers. Box cookers are probably the most common variety and can evenly cook large amounts of food. Some communities use homemade box-cooker ovens that hold and roast an entire turkey. Reflectors can be added, like the petals of a flower, to further focus the sun's rays into and around the solar cooker "belly" where the food rests. Panel cookers consist of various flat panels that focus the sun's rays onto a container inside a glass bowl or clear plastic bag. These can be made very cheaply with few materials. Parabolic cookers are reflective concave discs that focus the sun's rays onto the bottom of a pot. They are more complicated to make but follow the same principle as my Radio Shack solar cigarette lighter that I use for fire demonstrations. Parabolas you may have around the house that can be used to make a fire are the inside reflective bowl of a good-sized flashlight or the reflective bowl from the inside of a car headlight. Parabolas focus the sun's rays into a concentrated area and can cause wicked eye damage to people who insist on using their lighter to see how much gas they have left in their fuel tank.

  As a general rule, solar ovens take about twice the cooking time as a conventional oven. One of the beauties about box cooker ovens is you really have to work to burn something in them. Point it toward the sun, put the food in, adjust it once or twice as needed, and walk away—the perfect free crockpot. A friend of mine sets up his solar oven and points it south before he goes to work each day. Upon returning from work, his food is cooked and he sits down to a hot meal each evening.

  They also work well to simmer or at least pasteurize nonpotable water. Commercial solar ovens and many homemade ones are so efficient that even hazy days or the reduced insolation of the winter sun simply adds a bit more cooking time to yet another amazing meal. The taste of food cooked with the sun is "pure," and hard to describe as there is no taste hint of any fuel that you get with other methods.

  The Perfect Pot

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  HERE COMES THE SUN

  In many countries, poor residents (mostly women and girls) are forced to walk for hours each day to find firewood (a scarce commodity for two billion people in developing countries). When wood is scarce, people have to burn dung and crop residues which would otherwise have been composted to enrich poor soils for growing food. The time involved gathering fuel to cook food takes away from their educational opportunities, such as school or from learning various trades for greater independence, and sets them up for violent assaults common in locales such as Darfur in Africa.

  Sitting around a poorly burning camp fire each day is not healthy, as the chemicals in smoke cause long-term health effects. If solar ovens, which don't produce toxic smoke and can also pasteurize unsanitary water, were used in these countries, countless children would not be killed by waterborne and smoke-related diseases, which are the primary killers of children in developing countries. Poor urban families spend a good part of their meager paycheck on cooking fuels. The European Commission as well as solar cooker experts estimate that 165 to 200 million households could benefit from solar cookers.

  Today hundreds of thousands of solar cookers are being used on a regular basis, mostly in parts of India, China, and Africa. Slowly but surely, thanks to organizations such as Solar Cookers International (SCI) and many others, solar cooking can and will liberate hundreds of thousands from dependence on dwindling wood supplies, saving countries from continued environmental degradation and pollution caused from processing and burning human-made fuels, as well as saving families money and increasing their health. Far more than just a cool survival option, solar cookers can literally revolutionize the world and empower people with the free and limitless energy of the sun.

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  There are many opinions about what type of pot to use in a solar cooker. Here in the desert, it doesn't seem to matter much. Dark-
colored metal pots won't reflect as much long-wave radiation as shiny pots, but I've used both and they both work. Clear or colored glass works, too, as well as Corningware. If all you have are shiny pots, and you feel strongly about using a black pot, using it to cook over an open fire a few times will solve the problem, maybe forever. As a general rule, use dark-colored, shallow, lightweight metal pots.

  Making Your Own Solar Box Oven

  There are several designs in books, magazines, and on the Internet for making your own solar oven. For our purposes, we'll make one out of cardboard although you can use much more expensive materials if you wish. Paper burns at 451 degrees F (233 degrees C) and your oven won't get that hot. Cardboard works great unless it gets rained on, but hey, this is a solar oven so what's it doing in the rain? If you expect frequent moisture or want greater durability from your cardboard oven, paint the outside with house paint.