I’m not going full on prepper, but I’m starting to think about building up a several month’s worth stash of food – the state of the world and climate irregularities and all. And giving the current inflation, the can of stew I buy today and eat in June may very well end up saving me a buck or so.
And then I got to thinking about preparing the food, in the event of power outages. We have a couple of fireplaces, but haven’t lit a fire in either of them for at least a couple of decades, not to mention not having a pile of wood to burn in them. What happens in the case of prolonged power outages? What good are stocks of dry beans or rice or other grains, if you can’t cook them? Can you eat them raw? Not in the sense of choking them down, but can your digestive system handle them and extract vitamins and proteins and so on out of them?
Which made me think about good old cans/jars. A can of, say, cold condensed tomato soup glop straight from the can might not be anyone’s idea of good dining, but I think it would be completely safe and nutritious. Ditto for canned vegetables and fruits and all the meats and fish/seafood type foods I’ve thought of.
Are there any exceptions? Food stuffs that simply MUST be heated/cooked somehow?
(I’m thinking only of canned ‘foods’ here. If food-additive-#xxx is sold to manufacturers in cans to be used in creating something else, that doesn’t count.)
Actually canned foods are all cooked already, because that’s part of the sealing process. And anything that could even hypothetically happen to canned food to make it no good is something that cooking wouldn’t fix, either. So yes, they should be just as safe cold out of the can as they are prepared normally.
Once as a young teen us kids hiked to a distant site and brought our rations. Not only did we forget the matches, we forgot the can opener. We somehow managed to get the cans open but no fire. For years we sang a little ditty how, “We ate cold beans in Cromwell Park…”
The only almost-exception I can think of is certain brands and types of Indian spice paste sold in glass jars with the typical vacuum pop-up screwtop lid. So a “canned” good in the vacuum packing sense of the word even though the container is not made of metal.
Anyhow, in addition to the expected “refrigerate after opening” caution, some labels specify that the paste must be cooked and cannot be eaten raw.
When I first encountered that caution I was quite surprised. Which I take now in this thread as the exception that proves the general rule: If it’s vacuum packed, it’s edible without further cooking. And any exception to that will carry a caution.
I would think spice pastes like that are excluded in the OP (“I’m thinking only of canned ‘foods’ here. If food-additive-#xxx is sold to manufacturers in cans to be used in creating something else, that doesn’t count.”) Sure the spice pastes are aimed at consumers, not manufacturers but still, they’re to be used in creating something else.
Agree. Nobody in a survival situation would be wanting that product.
My real point was it was an example of a vacuum packed something that had a cautionary label. Which suggests to me that when the OP goes shopping for their hoard, they could look at the labels for signs of a “must cook” caution. Absent that caution they can reliably assume it’s a no cooking required product.
As a matter of statistics I’d bet only a tiny fraction of vacuum packed products have those cautions. So the OP could stock up with no heed of labels and still have little risk of buying something now they can’t use later during their post-civilizational apocalypse.
I suspect that those spice pastes would be safe to eat straight out of the jar, too. The cautions are to prevent people from eating it cold, finding it tastes terrible, and complaining about it.
As far as we know, the fireplace works. Would work, as far as we know – no wood supply, which I guess is easy enough to remedy, lots of people around N.E. will deliver loads of cut and split firewood – we just…don’t.
At least one of the chimneys is unblocked: about fifteen years ago a bat managed to fall down it into our living room. The current cats were ecstatic! They weren’t sure what to do with a flying mouse, but man, were they willing to give it a go.
Sure, sounds like a reasonable widening. I realized I have a lot of ways to cook foods – microwave, slow cooker, waffle iron, electric frying pan, a yogurt maker, even a doughnut fryer thingy someone gave us for Christmas – but all of them require electricity.
Though we might still have a little cast iron grill thingy out in the garage somewhere, but it took charcoal and I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to burn charcoal inside a house. Maybe I should look into some kind of camping stove?
You absolutely do not use a charcoal grill indoors, that’s the carbon monoxide road straight to the Pearly Gates. Charcoal, coal or wood must be used with a chimney or a stove with ventilation to the outside. A rule of thumb is that if it produces a blue flame instead of yellow, it’s safe-ish to use indoors but you still want good ventilation. Camp stoves using propane are common and convenient; I opted for an alcohol burner because the fuel is very easy to come by from multiple sources.
Using a propane burner indoors is only safe if the appliance is specifically designed, certified, and properly ventilated for indoor use. Using outdoor propane burners, such as camping stoves or BBQ grills, indoors is extremely dangerous due to the risks of carbon monoxide poisoning, fire, and explosion.
The tuna, usually frozen on the boat, was put on racks and wheeled into a large room where they were steam cooked, most delicious thing, I would pull out a peice and it tasted like really juicy turkey.
Then after it was cooled the fish went on an assembly line were they were cleaned; solid white, chunk light, and everything brown was cat food.
The cans were filled with fish, some water, there was a big tank of water filled with dried vegetables for flavor. A machine capped the cans and they rolled down the line into a big basket. One of my jobs was “tailing off” watching the cans hit a belt to prevent dents and go into these big baskets.
The baskets were wheeled into retorts, large pressure cookers, when they were done the cans were sealed.
Most canned goods are similarly cooked in large pressure cookers.
Cooking certain dry goods can mainly shorten the time until it’s edible by a considerable amount. Trail hikers will sometimes add water and let it sit for a long time, eating later in the day or the next morning. This is a similar concept to cold brew coffee.
Yes, I’d pick up a propane or white gas stove of some sort. Pressure canning is also something I’ve been exploring, commercial canners have a lot more powerful equipment and can get away with safely canning a lot of things that aren’t really possible at home. PC means it’s already been cooked. As for online canning communities, you can find two extremes of what’s safe, and everything in between. That’s a different discussion, but it’s important to note that the more conservative guides select for both safety and quality of the canned product, so some things don’t have canning recipes available simply because it’s possible and safe but not good.
If there’s any chance whatsoever that you might use them, get your chimneys checked. A chimney that hasn’t been used in decades, or even in a couple of years, may easily be seriously unsafe, or blocked entirely, or both. You don’t want to try to deal with an emergency by burning your house down.
And get a chimney cap fitted, to keep the birds and bats out, or it might become clogged in a lot less time than that.
ETA: Chimney caps let the smoke out. They’re not something you need to climb up and remove before you can light a fire.
Additional note: many modern fireplaces are designed for looks and will put very little heat into the house. You can get a fireplace insert that will. Get one with something resembling a cooking surface, if you’re going to get one.
