Got this request for interview subjects for the newspapers from a PR company I know, passing it along here, please note - DO NOT REPLY TO THIS PERSON IF YOU HAVE NOT PERSONALLY BEEN IN A LONG-TERM SITUATION W/O ELECTRIC BECAUSE OF HURRICANES.


Summary: Eating Well Without Electricity
Category: Lifestyle & Entertainment
Name: Jan M. Johnson
Email: hurricanefood@gmail.com

Deadline: 6:00 PM CENTRAL - September 30

Query:

"The extended power outages of hurricanes bring special challenges, namely what to eat and how to cook it. Were looking for unique
recipes from actual hurricane victims who are cooking (or just
stirring together) unexpectedly delicious concoctions in the face
of extreme circumstances.

Give us your tips on how to prepare, starting with the grocery
list. What did you buy that turned out to be a stroke of
brilliance? What food in your freezer were you able to turn into a
delicious meal? What keeps in the cooler better than you thought?
What foods would you NOT recommend? And what are the ingredients
needed to replicate your one-of-a-kind hurricane recipe? We want to
hear it ALL! Any other long-term, no-power survival tips are also
welcomed.

Please email your response to hurricanefood@gmail.com. Be sure to
include your name and the name, date, and location of the hurricane
you survived (example Ike 08, Houston, TX) along with your tips and
recipes. We will follow up your submission with a more detailed
survey. All selections will be properly credited.

This is a pretty strange request. How do you cook without electricity? Is common sense and practical knowledge really so lacking such as the know how to use a couple of cooking pots over an open fire or a gas stove etc, or are people really trying to rig up car batteries, inverters and microwave ovens because the TV dinner says to microwave the package on the instructions?

Are there really people out there who would stare blankly at a potato, then say 'what do you expect me to do with this?'

Apparently I even heard from some news reports that the first hot meal some folks had after Hurricane Ike had passed through days earlier was when McDs had opened up for business. Surely that must have been one of those news media 'dramatic' exaggerations!


Cooking without electricity isn't a problem, its doing the washing up afterwards thats the problem..

I'll go ahead and disqualify myself since I prefer to cook with gas and wood more anyways. LOL

This made me remember something my X-wife said to me once. My son and I were going camping and were talking about food (when I picked him up for the weekend) and I said for one of the lunches I had a box of Easy-Mac. She asked how you going to cook Easy Mac without a microwave? I told her a noodle has no idea what heated the water it’s sitting in, its just a noodle.

She just could not imagine cooking it in any way other then what the package (Using a microwave) said.

I think a lot of people can’t or will not even try to think in a way that is different then what they normally do. These are the ones the news media always puts on the nightly news to show how bad it is.

That's because those are the people that are waiting in line outside the just-reopened Burger Bell for their first hot meal while others are home working their way through two pounds of shrimp.

I don’t trust reporters to actually report things fairly and without a bias. I have a friend that is in a local gun club that was asked about a gun situation and the reporter seemed very nice when asking him questions. But when it got printed in the local paper it took on a very different anti gun slant. They took what he said out of context and it changed the whole thing. The asked a question and used his answer to another question to get the answer they wanted to convey.





I’m very leery of any printed story I see anymore, an uncut video is ok as you can actually see the whole line of questions, but not a newspaper.


For the most part the news media is not a friend of those that prepare for disasters and what if situations. They look at us and think wacko survivalist.




This e-mail came in about a week ago, but I have no interest in talking to, or trust of the press.

I'm an Associated Press reporter in New Orleans, working on an article about the civilian market for MREs and other long-term storage foods.

If you'd be open to an interview, please let me know when to call, and what number. My e-mail address is

janetmc@ap.org

(I checked with Doug Ritter about whether it's OK for me to make private inquiries like this. If you don't want to talk to me, that's your call. )

Janet McConnaughey
The Associated Press
1515 Poydras St., Ste 2500
New Orleans LA 70112

The question I have is how do you cook on anything BUT a gas stove?

But then Grandpa always said the food didn't "taste right" if it wasn't cooked on his wood burning stove.

Fresh corn fed rat Versus MRE

Sometimes it can be difficult to decide what makes a tastier meal.

The best thing we ever did for this was to take up backpacking. When we lose power, it's just an excuse to break out the backpacking stoves and play. With the Outback Oven, I can even bake a decent quickbread (cornbread, brownies, muffin loaf) on something as simple as a soda can alcohol stove. It sure makes all the rice/pasta/soup pouch meals go better.

Some brighter mind might want to jerk this journalist's chain, quoting liberally from the Roadkill Cookbook. I'm sure the recipe for some armadillo squash stew would brighten their daily.