When All Hell Breaks Loose (78 page)

While this might seem like a lot of water to use to wash dishes (and it is if all of the containers are full), fill the containers with only as much water as your family needs. You'll figure it out after the first time or two.

The Desert Deluxe Dishwashing System

In my arid region, the above method would be unacceptable unless attending a Rainbow Gathering or a heavy-metal concert. Deep in the wilderness, when hauling potable water is a pain, and even at my house, we wash dishes in a far different way. Personal bowls are half-filled with potable water. Using the spoon you ate with, swish and scrape the bowl until it is clean, thus cleaning the bowl and spoon. The "dishwater" is then drunk on the spot. The dishes are then laid out in the sun to disinfect.

The quicker you wash your dishes, the easier they will be to clean. At my house I use cold tap water (and rarely any soap) to wash dishes, which I do immediately after eating. I then lay them out to dry, and the collected dishwater is periodically poured onto plants in my xeriscape garden. The food particles never sit long enough to turn into a bacterial nightmare, and the drying dishes likewise don't become a habitat for anything funky that might want to propagate. The better you clean your plate when eating, the less food you'll have to wash off. While not recommended, there was a gentleman I knew of that had his dog do the dishes, after which he would stack them back in the cupboard—no doubt a single guy.

Chilling Out

Conventional refrigerators are a fairly recent invention. Both of my grandparents utilized basements and root cellars to keep food cooler during the year, and I remember standing in both with flashlights and radios due to tornadoes. Almost every household should have a cooler that can be used to store food in a pinch. Keep it outside in the cool of the night and bring it back inside during hotter day-time temperatures and store it in the cooler part of the house. In the wintertime, keeping food cool is sometimes not the problem, it's how to keep it from freezing—better frozen than not cold enough, however. Many times a cooler will prevent foods from freezing unless the temperatures are extreme, as insulation works for both hot and cold.

The easiest way to not rely upon a refrigerator is to not need one. Canned goods of the proper size ensure there will be no leftovers. Store dried or freeze-dried foods and
prepare only what your family will eat at each meal
, unless it's something that doesn't require refrigeration such as bread. While the eat-as-you-go method takes more time and uses more fuel, it's better than dancing with diarrhea from
staphylococcal enteritis
or some other busy bug.

I created built-in cooling tubes in my house in the hope that they would suffice as refrigeration. Due to a design flaw, I was wrong, but they're still great places to store food at a cooler temperature than the rest of the house. Try what my grandmother did for cooling with water and burlap. Or consider the following method: An African potter devised a homemade cooler by using two unglazed clay pots, one larger than the other. He put the smaller pot into the larger pot and filled the void between the two with wet sand. Both of these devices are built upon the principles you already know about: conduction, convection, and evaporation.

Compost

Unless things get over-the-top hardcore, there will be items on the dinner plate that you will want to get rid of. Vegetable and fruit scraps, eggshells, and many other food wastes can be composted. And while gardeners will cringe, for our purposes compost the meat scraps as well. Men in garbage trucks might not appear for a while so plan ahead about dealing with your waste products. If you don't already have a compost pit in the backyard, make one. Mine consists of free wooden pallets screwed together into a square. You can also cut the bottom out of an existing garbage can with a lid, throw a screen in the bottom, set it on the bare ground, and pitch food directly into it. Quickie compost areas can be nothing more than a hand-dug pit, identical to a latrine for going to the bathroom, or you can simply throw food scraps into the poop pit.

After food scraps are added to your compost pile, cover it with earth to shield it from critters. If your compost area is protected with a fence or some other means, you won't have to use as much earth (thus you'll have to dig new holes less often) to cover the table scraps to keep Fido from digging up the goods. When the contents come to within a foot of the surface, fill in the hole completely. Like the sanitation latrine, a mound of dirt is left on top to level out by itself as the garbage underneath decomposes and settles. It will be a great place to plant a garden when the emergency is over. If used only for kitchen scraps, compost pits can be located fairly close to the kitchen.

The art of composting is fairly involved and can take many forms. Compost piles can generate heat that inactivates all bad pathogens, or they can be propagated with red worms to eat the contents, thereby producing pathogen-free yet yummy worm castings that plants adore. I have heard of some compost piles getting so hot that they burst into flames. Although this is rare, don't have the pile next to the house.

If you're an apartment dweller, treat your food scraps the same way you do your poop and pee (according to the sanitation chapter) until something better comes along. Believe me, food scraps will smell and look almost as nasty as poop after a few days in hot weather so don't casually throw them into the corner of your room. Human waste and food waste are both major pest magnets.

Grey Water

Every household produces
grey water
and
black water
. Grey water is produced from the kitchen sink or the washing machine, black water from the toilet. Pathetically, Arizona just recently legalized grey-water systems for watering plants and trees around homes. As usual, human nature waits until things get bad instead of looking ahead at preventing the cause of a pending shortage. Better late then never, guys; we were all using grey water to water our plants anyway.

Large plants and trees will aggressively gobble up the nutrients available in grey water. If you water your vegetation, you'll need to consider things such as not adding toxic stuff to your wash water. Use biodegradable soaps and rotate grey water onto different plants to let them rest between soakings.

If you don't plan on adding grey water to plants (and why not?), it should
not
be thrown into the compost or pit latrines in quantity, as it will water down the organisms that break down the contents. Grey water can start to smell if no plants are present to utilize the water so plan on digging a separate hole just for grey water. The size of the hole will depend upon how much water gets tossed in and how well the ground "perks" or soaks up the liquid. Start with a two- by two-foot hole and make it bigger if necessary. This grey water "sump," as it's called, can be located next to the kitchen compost pile.

Food Preparation, Serving, and Handling

Be mindful that preparing food is a serious responsibility. The preparer has the power and opportunity to get the entire family sick. The food-prep person should be meticulous about personal sanitation and should have thoroughly washed his or her hands before commencing to prepare or serve any and all food items. An adequate wash station for hands, which both cook and patron should use, should accompany all kitchens. Tables or other objects should be used to keep food preparation off the ground and should be covered when not in use. After each meal, wash the surfaces with soapy water, rinse, rinse them again with bleach water, and then allow them to air dry in the sun. Keep the food preparation table(s) free of personal items at all times.

In large families or group settings, for better management of potential sanitation breaches, one person should serve the entire family or group. The server should have the person hold their personal bowl near the edge but not touching or directly over the serving container. This avoids food running down the potentially contaminated sides of the dish and back into the serving container. Some outdoor kitchens use a plastic funnel with the bottom cut out to facilitate getting food into narrow containers. Foods should be served in a manner that the serving equipment NEVER touches the individuals' eating bowl or plate.

Keep serving containers covered when not in use and keep the serving utensil in a separate container other than the food pot, as organisms can travel down the handle into the pot to multiply. When taste-testing food for seasoning, drop a sample into a personal bowl to avoid contaminating the serving utensil. Prepared foods, raw or cooked, should be served and eaten promptly.

Preppin' and Cookin' the Critter: How to Eat
Your Trapped Rats and Mice

If you've followed the advice on trapping rodents given in the Familiar yet Fantastic Food chapter, or if you're a natural hunter, I'm assuming you have fresh meat for the grill. Congratulations!

As a general rule, check your traps in the morning and evening, or whenever you feel the need to do so. Rodents that have lain dead in a trap all night long will still be OK to eat, even in hot climates, so don't weeny out and think it's been sitting too long to be edible. If you heed the advice given in the first sentence of this paragraph, rotting rodents won't be a problem.

I rarely see fleas on the rats and mice I trap. In truth, at closer glance they are very clean and beautiful creatures. Part of this is because the body has cooled off and the fleas have split. Still, I have watched rodents be caught and, upon inspection of the still warm body, didn't find any fleas. Other small critters such as ground squirrels, tree squirrels, and cottontail rabbits might be literally crawling with fleas and ticks. You can put the body in a zipper-lock bag until it's butchering time if you wish, or let the body cool naturally, away from your living area.