Most of us, at some point in our lives, have experienced a power outage. A lot of us have experienced at least one power outage that lasted days, or weeks, rather than hours.
I’m going to talk about preparing for a scenario where you need to feed your family but you’ve lost power for weeks, or months, or…TEOTWAWKI…(the end of the world as we know it…) forever. If you need to bug-in long term, you’re going to need to get your kitchen ready.
There are numerous reasons why we might lose power for a lengthy period of time, including a grid-down scenario, either by terrorist attack directly on our grid, EMP, extremely bad weather events, or natural disaster. Or, you know, my favorite – zombies.
The time to prepare for a lengthy loss of power is – you got it – now. And that means you’ll want to make sure that your kitchen is SHTF-ready, or even TEOTWAWKI-ready. All of the things that you’ll need to buy to prepare food for your family without power are readily available now.
After the grid goes down…these items will be worth their weight in plutonium, and it may be dangerous to travel, and in a long term or permanent SHTF world, money may not be worth anything so you wouldn’t be able to buy these things anyway. (This is a scenario where you’d want to make sure that you have items to barter in an SHTF scenario.)
“But I’ve got plenty of food…we’ll be fine!”
If you have enough food to feed every single member of your family for a few months, that’s a great first start. You are way ahead of most people.
When the power goes out, you will no longer have access to running water. Do you also have enough water for everyone in your family – a gallon a day for drinking, and another gallon for washing teeth and washing hands, and another gallon for washing dishes, and a gallon for cooking with your dehydrated food?
In Colonial America, colonists used an average of several gallons of water per day per person, and that is with very infrequent bathing.
If not, time to start stocking up. Stackable water storage containers (affiliate link) like these are a great way to go. Keeping some in your kitchen means you won’t have to carry it in from other rooms.
So, take into account how many people there are in your family, and figure out how much water you’d need per person, per day. Three gallons a day per person, 90 gallons a month, is a comfortable, safe estimate, and again, this does not allow for taking baths.
So now you’ve got the water issue taken care of – let’s move on to food. What kind of food do you have in your kitchen right now?
Because food in your refrigerator will not last very long when the power goes out. According to the CDC, food will only last about four hours after power goes out. It will last 48 hours in a full freezer and 24 hours in a half freezer – if you don’t open the freezer doors.
This will vary depending on a number of factors, including how full the freezer is – the more full it is, the longer it will maintain a low temperature. It will also depend on the type of food – meat and milk will spoil faster than fruit and bread, for instance.
Quick tip: If you lose power and don’t anticipate getting it back any time soon, and you don’t have a backup generator or your generator isn’t working or runs out of fuel, the first thing you’ll want to cook and eat is the perishable foods, so they don’t go to waste.
But, long before that, you should start preparing your kitchen for a lengthy power loss.
Let there be light!
To start off, make sure you can actually see what you’re cooking! I have a lot of long-burning indoor candles that fit into little lanterns, as well as glass lamps, wicks, and lamp oil. Matches, lots and lots of matches, are also a must for any prepper. Flash-lights and battery-powered lanterns are nice, but batteries don’t last that long, and if you have no power, your rechargeble batteries aren’t going to be much good to you once they die.
Now that you can see what you’re doing, let’s talk about how you’re going to prepare your food.
Indoor Cooking Safety Tips
A big danger of cooking indoors is the risk of carbon monoxide poisoning. Carbon monoxide is a colorless, odorless gas that can kill. Safety tip: Do NOT cook with charcoal indoors, because charcoal releases a lot of carbon monoxie.
I recommend getting carbon monoxide detectors and lots of extra batteries for them so that you can test carbon monoxide levels when you are cooking indoors, no matter what type of equipment you are using, and also, make sure your cooking area is well ventilated.
What to cook on, indoors, in a grid down situation
- Wood stoves. A wood stove, and a good supply of firewood, would obviously be ideal for anyone preparing for power outages of any tupe. And not just any wood stove, but a wood stove designed for cooking. If you have a wood stove, get your chimney inspected every year! If you don’t have a wood stove, and can’t afford to have one professionally installed, there are other options, including…
- You can cook in your fireplace.
People have cooked with a Dutch oven, or the equivalent, in fireplaces, for eons. (They didn’t call them Dutch ovens eons ago, but you get the idea.) You can roast meat and vegetable on skewers. You can buy a fireplace grill and cook some meals in the fireplace. Make it a fun camp-in experience with your kids. Teaching your kids how to cook in unconventional ways – not just relying on the electric (or gas) oven and the microwave – is an important part of teaching your kids how to prep for any disaster.
- Portable Butane Stove and Sterno. Sterno is rated safe fuel for indoor and outdoor cooking. I am eyeing a Sterno s’mores maker, as well. Once that zompocalypse finally starts – what’s taking so long? – damn straight I plan to eat s’mores while the world burns down.
- Folding camp stove, chafing dish, and Canned Heat.
- MRE Heaters and MREs. (Meals Ready To Eat).
- Cooking with candles. Not ideal, takes a lot of candles, but desperate times call for desperate measures. Put a bunch of tea-lights on a non-flammable surface. Put a small camping grill over them. Put your camping pan on top of the grill, and light those candles to create a little candle cooking fire. Have a fire extinguisher nearby.
Cooking outdoors In A Grid-Down Situation:
Your options open up a lot if you don’t have to worry about carbon monoxide risks.
- Any kind of camping stove, including fuel tab stoves, and isopropyl alcohol fueled stoves. There are a million options at outdoor shops and online. Make sure you have the appropriate fuel for the camping stove.
- A grill. If you haven’t ever grilled outdoors, learn how to do it before SHTF. To prepare for a long-term SHTF scenario, get a grill that uses wood as fuel, because propane and charcoal briquettes won’t last forever.
- Firepit
- Outdoor pizza oven
- Campfire
Now is also a great time to learn how to chop firewood and build a camp-fire, even if you don’t have a fireplace. A Dutch oven and a campfire grill will come in very handy in an SHTF scenario, and if you ever needed to bug out, a campfire could keep you warm on a chilly night.
Ensure that you have all debris cleared away from your cooking area, because if you don’t have power, you’re not going to be able to call 911 if you accidentally start a fire.
When is it not safe to use a fireplace, woodstove, or an outdoor grill?
An outdoor grill or campfire might not be safe to use in certain weather conditions. If it’s windy out, and there is a drought, you’ll want to consider the location of your grill and whether it’s close to any trees or vegetation that could catch fire. A single spark carried by the wind could create a raging forest fire.
Another scenario where it might not be safe to use a fireplace, woodstove, or an outdoor grill is in a long-term SHTF situation, where there has been a breakdown of law and order.
In that case, there are going to be desperate, hungry people roaming around looking for food.
That column of smoke from your fireplace or woodstove or campfire is an advertisement to them that someone’s cooking. It can be seen from a very long way away, and a fireplace fire is a very distinctive column of smoke that is basically sending smoke signals saying “Dinner’s ready!”
The next thing you know, you’ve got a mob in your backyard, wanting to be invited to your barbecue – and not taking no for an answer.
It doesn’t matter if you and your spouse and even your kids are armed (as you should be). You may be prepared for fending off a few people, but very few of us are prepared to fight off dozens of people, or hundreds of people.
In a grid-down, societal collapse scenario, there’s also the risk of someone with a long-range rifle following that smell of cooking and that smoke, and then picking you off while you’re sitting outside cooking.
Starving, desperate people do desperate things. So do gangs of thugs, or even individual thugs, who know that the police aren’t coming.
Unfortunately, in this kind of scenario, your best bet is to cook indoors. You may have to go outdoors to tend to a garden or livestock, but it’s a matter of risk management and not advertising your presence any more than necessary, and a campfire is a big ole’ neon sign calling out to bandits. Again, the campfire or fireplace fire can be seen from a very long way away.
If you need to cook indoors, consider having blackout curtains, which is a good security measure to have anyway, so nobody can look in your window and see what you’re doing. In a case like this, you’ll have to weigh the safety of ventilating the room, against the risk of releasing cooking odors.
What To Cook
As we’ve mentioned, the foods in the fridge and freezer won’t be good for very long. You will want to have an outdoor garden, and a kitchen garden, and a supply of food that lasts a long time.
Store the food in airtight containers, with oxygen absorbers, and take appropriate pest-control measures. Bay leaves and cotton balls soaked in peppermint oil discourage a lot of pests.
- Canned foods – keep rotating these, using the First in First Out method.
- Buckets of dehydrated foods ordered from companies like Augoson or Mountain House.
- Granola and trail mix
- Oatmeal
- Wheat berries
- Ghee – It’s a kind of shelf-stable butter
- Corn Starch for thickening
- Baking Soda and Baking powder and yeast for baking. Yeast does expire, keep an eye on the expiration date and keep using and replacing as needed.
- Peanut Butter
- Food that you’ve canned and preserved
- Beans
- Rice, with oxygen absorbers. To prevent bugs in rice, bake it first in the oven, to kill any larvae.
- Dried fruits
- Canned milk
- Powdered milk
- Instant Coffee
- Sugar and salt should be on your list
- MREs (Military meals. Meals Ready to Eat.)
- Pasta
- Honey
- Maple Syrup
No-power tools and utensils
When anticipating a grid-down situation, it makes sense to get as many tools as possible that do not depend on electricity or batteries.
Do I prefer my digital scale? You betcha. But batteries don’t last forever. I have a couple of non-digital food scales. Do I prefer my electric coffee grinder? Heck yeah, but I also have a hand crank coffee grinder. I also have a hand-crank wheat-berry grinder, manual can openers, a hand mixer, a hand-crank apple peeler, a cast-iron pancake grill, a hand-crank food processor, and other non-electric appliances.
As you cook and prepare meals, start keeping track of what appliances you are using now. Which ones rely on electricity? Make a list, and then look for non-electric alternatives. You don’t have to buy them all at once. You can start with one a month, or one a paycheck. Things like a manual can-opener aren’t expensive. Within a few months, you can build up a decent supply of kitchen appliances that you would be able to use in a permanent grid-down scenario.