About 18 months ago we had a major and unusual wind storm called a Derecho. Nobody had ever heard the term before but it is a windstorm related to thunderstorms that knocked out power for four days all over the region. By the time we regained power everybody had to throw out all the food in the freezer. Most of us didn't have the sort of emergency food discussed above but for the first two days we simply ate the thawing meat in the freezer. After that, we got concerned about bacteria and ate canned food or pasta. Oddly this was the second such experience that we had in Ottawa. A few years ago a tornado hit parts of the city and knocked out one of the two main transformer stations blacking out about 300,000 homes.

The point I want to make however, is that food is not the only thing you need. You also need a mechanism for cooking it. As a precaution, I always buy a BBQ with a side burner and always have a full back-up tank of propane. This arrangement has served us well. You can heat water for tea, coffee or soup on the side burner and with a bit of fussing, you can use the BBQ as an oven (Heat it to temperature and then turn off all but one burner)