Survival Foods

[Allen]

Absolutely.
I find compared to Europe America has defaulted almost exclusively to refrigeration.
Dehydrating, freeze drying, pickling & so on are far more prevalent over the pond. Far less food & types of food are refrigerated or frozen there.

I remember as a kid seeing canned (mason jars) preserves in nearly every "old persons" homes. Most of us had pear and fig trees (apples don't grow good down here).

Fig preserves spread on biscuits was the way to go back then.

Meats were cooked in a smoke house and preserved with salt (before my time though). Potatoes were kept in cool cellars or other cool spots and lasted many days.

My mother never refrigerated chicken eggs and they stayed fresh for days. They aren't refrigerated when the hen lays them.

[Mark in Ottawa]

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)

[Phloating Phlasher]

Yes we have a charcoal BBQ with a smoker.
In an emergency I'll load that thing to the gills & do a giant smoke out!
Where we lived there was a vandalism act that trashed the local power transformers & switching station. It was some kind of custom install & took a couple of weeks to even get partially running with standard replacements. THen it limped along for almost a year while a custom (upgraded) replacement was built & installed.
None of it went to waste.
Better that than wasting perfectly usable food.

[Former Cav]

reminds me, I have to buy one of those little propane cook tops that had two burners. I gave mine away when I moved.