No Freezers
I mean that two ways. (1) Don’t rely on frozen food for an emergency, because (2) there may be no freezers working.
In a serious emergency and practically every disaster situation, electrical power goes out. It can stay out for weeks. Or longer. We’ve seen it happen this winter in various locations around the country as power lines are taken out by trees that have been simply weighted down by snow and ice.
There are factors that can make food in a freezer last a while with the power off. It may be winter outside, and all you have to do to keep the food sub-zero is take the freezer outside. But that isn’t possible in most places. The other possibility is to have an alternate source of power to generate electricity. If you have something like a wind power generator, or a real solar setup that gives you lots of juice, you’ve got it made in the shade… if you want to divert that much of your precious auxiliary power to a freezer. As far as having a gas-powered generator, unless you live next to a gasoline cracking plant, you’re going to run out sooner or later. Probably sooner.
I think it’s a better idea, even if you have some auxiliary electrical power, not to depend on frozen food in an emergency. If you have a few pounds of food frozen in a refrigerator freezer, okay, you can wait until it starts defrosting to cook it up, in the meantime eating the food in the above-freezing part of your refrigerator. That extends the timeframe of your food supply a little. But do not let previously frozen food sit defrosted for any length of time, because dangerous bacteria multiplies rapidly on defrosted frozen food. That’s the reason we’re told not to refreeze food. Much safer to cook it while there are still some ice crystals throughout the package, even though it will take more of your cooking fuel. If you have any.
The best option to frozen food is prepackaged emergency food. The more I talk with people, the more I think that, for most people, prepackaged emergency food is better than getting food at the grocery and storing it. Keeping regularly packed food properly takes more time, energy, planning and thinking. Unless you are the kind of person who likes a challenge, or simply cannot afford prepackaged emergency food, maybe the simplest way is the best way. You can get things that stay good for 5 or even 25 years, and not have to worry about your emergency food supply for a long time.
With grocery store food, you need to be constantly vigilant and rotating stock. Frankly, we do that, and it takes some time, but we don’t mind it. That way we get our pure organic food that we like so much. But not everyone is into pure organic food. If you are not, that takes away a great deal of the incentive to do it the grocery store way.
Whichever way you think is best for you, the time to get it is before the rush. If you think we may be in the calm before the storm, as I think, now is a very good time to do it.
