Grid Down Food Tips & Tricks

Grid Down Food Tips & Tricks

We need to drink, and we need to eat. There’s just no getting around those two facts. It doesn’t matter if the grid is up or down, we need nourishment to survive and thrive… and that’s why most prepping starts with those two key elements.

If the stuff hits the fan, if the grid goes down, we dig into our storage and food and water and go on about our business, right?

Well that’s a great plan. In reality, it’s a bit more complicated than just that… so let’s take a look at some tips & tricks to make things go a bit more smoothly when the lights go out. 

It’s probably not TEOTWAWKI, But…

When the lights go off, it’s probably not the start of The End Of The World As We Know It (TEOTWAWKI) or even a Stuff Hits The Fan (SHTF) situation. It’s probably not an EMP or Solar Flare, more likely it’s an electrocuted squirrel that shorted out a transformer, or it’s an ice storm dropping trees on lines. 

Of course, you probably know what’s going on because of weather events in your area (hurricanes, strong thunderstorms, flooding, etc.), and if that’s the case you have extra time to prepare. 

Flooding, of course, presents a whole bunch of additional problems, so we will take a look at those as well. 

Fridges & freezers without power

No prepper relies on refrigerated and frozen food as their main source of prepping supplies, but most of us have a refrigerator and freezer full of food that we don’t want to lose if the power goes out. 

One obvious solution for this is a generator, which you can start and plug your appliances into. This has both good and bad sides (we are going to leave the pros & cons of generators for another series of articles) but it will keep your food cold.

According to FEMA’s food safety guidelines: “Without electricity or a cold source, food stored in refrigerators and freezers can become unsafe. Bacteria in food grow rapidly at temperatures between 40 and 140 °F, and if these foods are consumed you can become very sick. Thawed food usually can be eaten if it is still “refrigerator cold.” It can be re-frozen if it still contains ice crystals. To be safe, remember, “When in doubt, throw it out.”

In a normal year, under everyday circumstances, one out of six Americans will have an attack of food poisoning. I’ve had food poisoning a couple of times, and let me tell you that’s one dance you REALLY don’t want to step to. I can’t imagine anything worse short of a long-term injury or dying to have going on during a grid-down situation than sitting on a pot with a bucket in your arms, having it come back out of both ends. Been there, done that, never want to go there again. 

Borrowing this from FEMA, here’s their do and don’t list:

Do:

• Keep food in covered containers.
• Keep cooking and eating utensils clean.
• Discard any food that has come into contact with contaminated flood water.
• Also Discard any food that has been at room temperature for two hours or more.
• Discard any food that has an unusual odor, color or texture.
• Use ready-to-feed formula. If you must mix infant formula use bottled water, or boiled as a last resort.

Don’t:

• Eat foods from cans that are swollen, dented or corroded, even though the product may look safe to eat.
• Eat any food that looks or smells abnormal, even if the can looks normal.
• Let garbage accumulate inside, both for fire and sanitation reasons.

Cooking

Spice recently did an article about cooking without power which you can read by clicking here. There are a ton of ways to cook, but there are also some ways that can be very dangerous (like cooking inside using stoves designed for outside us. Don’t do this! Bad dog, no biscuit!

What about the food that’s in the fridge and freezer? 

Again, FEMA hits the basics so rather than reinvent the wheel I’m going to borrow theirs and add to it a bit from my own experience

• Keep the refrigerator and freezer doors closed as much as possible.
• The refrigerator will keep food cold for about 4 hours if it is unopened.
• Refrigerated or frozen foods should be kept at 40° F or below for proper food storage.
• Use a refrigerator thermometer to check temperature. Salty’s Note: This is something that every refrigerator and every cooler should have in it. They are cheap, buy several and use them. 
• Refrigerated food should be safe as long as the power was out for no more than 4 hours, assuming you kept the food at 40 degrees or less.
• Discard any perishable food (such as meat, poultry, fish, eggs or leftovers) that has been above 40° F for two hours or more.

Here are a few more from my own experience:

• You can safely store eggs without refrigeration if the eggs have been treated. We are going to teach you how to do this in a future article here on 3BY.
• You can extend the amount of time the fridge stays cold by keeping it full.
• If you have any extra freezer space, take gallon milk jugs or two-liter bottles, fill them (mostly full) and freeze them. Make sure they don’t burst, if they do discard them. If they don’t, these big chunks of ice will help keep food frozen in your deep freeze or function as an ice-box in your refrigerator. 
• Get some clear packing tape and tape your refrigerator and freezer doors shut. This will insure that the doors are fully shut, and more importantly make it a pain in the tail to open them up, helping to insure they stay closed as much as possible.
• If it’s winter and there is ice outside, the entire outdoors is your refrigerator. Just remember to block the critters access.

Using Dry Ice:

If you have time ahead of an event (i.e. you know a hurricane is coming) you can lay in a good store of dry ice, and that will REALLY help you weather a longer-term power outage (several days) without losing a bunch of food. 

The key thing is you need to buy the ice BEFORE the lights go out. 

Many grocery stores and pharmacies sell dry ice, so keep your eyes open for the coolers (I know that my  grocery store, Hy-Vee, has a dry ice cooler back in the dairy section). 

A few dry ice tips from FEMA:

• Know where you can get dry ice prior to a power outage.
• Twenty-five pounds of dry ice will keep a 10-cubic-foot freezer below freezing for 3-4 days.
• If you use dry ice to keep your food cold, make sure it does not come in direct contact with the food.
• Use care when handling dry ice, wear dry, heavy gloves to avoid injury.

Bleach is your friend

There is no greater friend to a prepper than bleach when the power goes out. 

Here’s a couple of things bleach does (taken from Spice’s article on bleach which you can read HERE).

Clean water:  Killing most organisms that inhabit water, making it much safer to drink. A quarter teaspoon per gallon, followed by a one hour sit time before consumption, is what Washington State’s public health people recommend.  This will destroy bacteria, most viruses, and many other nasties. Cryptosporidium (a parasitic protozoan) is not reliably removed, but hundreds of other things are.  It does taste nasty, but I’d absolutely take that over water-borne diarrheal diseases.

Disinifect surfaces: For casual cleanups, such as making a table in the laundry room a suitable place to pack up bandages and other first-aid supplies, one tablespoon per gallon is fine.  For washing a surface you suspect is contaminated with someone’s body fluids that you don’t wish to share, 1 part bleach to 9 parts water will do.  This wash is even used to clean up nerve agent spills. A water rinse is suggested afterwards; at that concentration bleach can corrode metal.

Bleach is a Prepper’s Friend… temporarily

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