re: #85 Bert’s House of Beef and Obdicuts

It’s always interesting what’s actually the most valuable or helpful thing after a disaster. In New York, after Sandy, we got the food settled pretty quickly, without outside supplies. But power was out all over the place, and it was friggin’ cold in some of the buildings, especially the projects. Even more than that, the power out meant no light, so weirdly the thing we suddenly needed tons of was these LCD strips that were supposed to be mounted on your monitor or something, but they could but stuck to the wall or carried around, they were rechargeable battery-powered. So first we distributed those, then we did a lot of bucket rounds to collect spent batteries and recharge them at the generators that were scattered around.

And yet shitloads of food kept being dropped off, even though there were a lot of flyers and PSAs and stuff about food donations not being necessary.

Yeah, I would imagine that batteries can be more useful than food.

I bought this book “Apocalypse Chow” about how to stock your pantry and whip up gourmet meals when there’s a power outage. It assumes that you have a primus or coleman stove available to cook with.