All You Can Eat

Luckily, the power didn’t go out during the most recent snowfall. It was a few flakes over a foot this time. I knew I would be snowed in, so my strategy was preparedness and supply conservation.

Obviously I bought enough beer and bourbon to hold me through a few days of snow induced house arrest, but food would be another issue.

Essentially, food provisions boil down to two types: those you have to heat up, and those you don’t. You can find a box of pasta on sale at the grocery store for about a dollar. But without power, you can’t boil the water to cook it. Same goes for raw meats and frozen food items. Note that for the purposes of this explanation, I’m ignoring the potential of cooking with cast iron in the fireplace.

The second food category consists of items you can eat ‘as is.’ Raw veggies, fruit, nuts, most canned goods, bread, and as was my diet for the last day, deli meats, are all good expamples. During the early part of the storm, while power was on, I ate items from the first category to sustain my stash of those in the second. I was eating food that required power to prepare in case later on, if I had lost power, I still had food to eat that didn’t require electricity to prepare.

Of course, items like deli meats are in category 2 in the winter and category 1 in the summer because they require refrigeration. If power had gone out, I could have kept my ham and swiss from spoiling by placing them inside a large cooler, i.e. my front porch. My only concern then would be whether I had a ham sammy or a ham-and-swiss popsicle.

Luckily, I didn’t have to rely on my preparation this time. The key, though, is that I could have if I needed to.

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