ENERGY

Driven by decades of innovation in camping and survival cooking, there's no reason why you can't enjoy hot meals whenever you've got the time to fire up a portable stove. Hot meals have long served as fundamental taste-enhancing, morale-boosting components of the basic human survival game-plan (remember what we typically gathered around before we harnessed electrons?) -- and in any case heating is required for freeze-dried foods and recommended for MRE's.

No rocket science here; basically, all you need is a controlled sustained flame that will boil water. This temperature is all you'll need to warm freeze-dried foods and MRE's (or cook soups, stews or make hot beverages). Your only considerations are fuel type and cooking rig.

Technolithic Recommends:

First of all, make sure you have an abundance of fire-starting materials. These should include not only igniters (matches and lighters), but also starter fuels. There are abundant choices in both categories, but a mix of waterproof matches (lots of Coghlan's), butane lighters (a bag of the regular kind, but get a fancy windproof one if you like) and a couple of magnesium fire starters will do to get things started. Wet Fire Tinder is the best fire starter out there, but I like to have some Fire Ribbon around because this "camper's napalm" has some other unconventional uses. Similar products work just fine, and once again, it's great to have redundancy. And even though I feel naked without matches, it turns out that the newest cooking technology eliminates much of the need for an abundance of fire starters.

Stoves:

I have to admit that if I were headed out for a little conventional backpacking, I'd be sorely tempted to pack my trusty Primus with the no-fuss dependable butane/propane fuel canister. But returning to the point I brought up at the beginning of this section, I'm after something different here, namely fuels that have much better availability during the "long emergency." I'm after gear that won't send me back to the camping supply store for more fuel canisters (think about it -- how many of those special fuel canisters are within 10 miles of your home?). It may seem a bit of a stretch, but read on to see how to beat rigid fuel dependence.

PRELIMINARIES | WATER | FOOD | ENERGY