# Camouflage Food Prep



## OctopusPrime (Dec 2, 2014)

Cooking in a time/environment surrounded by war, collapse of law/social norms and starvation should be looked at as hazardous to your health. Steps need to be taken to avoid showing anyone what you have. 

Dangers linked to food and the preparation of food- Smell, smoke being seen, trash 

Idea generation log:


1. Soaking rice whether it be wild rice, sushi rice, brown rice, jasmine rice will rehydrate the aquatic grain. You can eat rice raw/uncooked but you should soak it first for about 3 days. To assist in sanitation you can add vinegar or salt to the soaking water; doing this will hamper bacteria to grow while you are soaking the rice. Can you eat beans if they are soaked in water for long enough without altering your digestive health? I have never tried but I wonder the impact it would have on your digestion. 

2. Cooking anything creates smells. Image not eating anything for 1 week or 2 weeks or 3 weeks....the smell of a cracked can of baked beans would reach your ole factory from a mile away. So this raises the question...How do I mask the odor? My initial response is to eat most things raw and avoiding creating the smells in the first place. However, what do you do when you nab a bird, fish, ect? Maybe the correct answer is to never cook around where you store your food or where you live. Treat it as if hungry bears are around at all times. Make sure you leave no trace of trash. It is the little things like candy wrappers, gum wrappers, cig butts, coke can metal tabs. leaving those around anywhere shows you have luxury items and most likely food. 

3. Masking the odor could be done through a vent which had a series of air filters. I look at new inventions like these solar ovens with great interest in this regard. Something that can have a chamber with filtered vents could mask the smell enough to hide from humans detection. No smoke and no smell. All of this is possible for a home location but not when you are on the move. 

Please add ideas and thoughts ^^.


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## Maine-Marine (Mar 7, 2014)

I honestly do not think this is going to be a really big deal unless you are in a very populated area or somebody happens by

yes you can smell food, you can also smell smoke and crap and dead animals

I will be burning wood to keep warm...
I will be butchering animals - animals that will be making noise and pooping
chances are I will have to use the outhouse


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## Chipper (Dec 22, 2012)

The smell of cooking food could also be used as a trap, just sayin.


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## SecretPrepper (Mar 25, 2014)

Chipper said:


> The smell of cooking food could also be used as a trap, just sayin.


For some reason this made me think of the movie the book of Eli. Where the old couple asked if they wanted somthing to eat.


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## Kauboy (May 12, 2014)

Just because we can smell it doesn't mean we can find it.
Our sense of smell isn't very strong. We may detect something, but determining its origin would be harder.
Unless someone happened to see signs of cooking, the smell alone would likely only attract the local wild dog pack.


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## AquaHull (Jun 10, 2012)

I'll mask the food odors with spent gunpowder


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## Medic33 (Mar 29, 2015)

don't know about that smell stuff my wife could smell a bowel of white rice in a snow storm 100 yards away and take you right to it.


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## Will2 (Mar 20, 2013)

OctopusPrime said:


> Cooking surrounded by hazardous to your health.
> 
> Smell, smoke being seen, trash





> 1. Soak rice for three days then eat rice raw/uncooked.
> add vinegar or salt to the soaking water; doing this will hamper bacteria to grow while you are soaking the rice. Can you eat beans if they are soaked in water for long enough without altering your digestive health? I have never tried but I wonder the impact it would have on your digestion.


Personally I've soaked rice when I havn't been able to cook with fire due to everything being too wet. I have found that it tends to start fermenting fairly easy, gives it an odd taste, but still edible, I'm still alive. It doesn't digest as well so you don't get as much food value. I would say consider a solar oven. When you are starving any food, even dirt can be appreciated to ease the mind. If you have never gone without food for a week or so, you should give it a go once in a while to clean your system out, and prepare yourself mentally for starvation. Starvation without the psychological trauma, is actually fairly relaxing after the first few days, its like a withdrawal, both physical and mental, I would surmise like other physical and mental additions from the internet to smoking, to stopping use of sugar.



> Cooking anything creates smells. never cook around where you store your food or where you live.


Hmm well if food is that scarce you got bigger problems. There was an old trick to mask smoking indoors, what the kids did was use fabric softner strips to mask the smell of smoke, it gives a scent but it masks the real scent. Another is using deoderyzer sprays, or deionizers.

I personally think if you have to worry about people robbing you for food, venturing outside is more dangerous than cooking inside. I would think the smell of rotting bodies and sewage would mask the smell of the food.

There is of course, cooking then going to another location.

If food is that scarce houses will be ransacked for anything of value who cares if you are there or not.

Personally I disagree I think you are safer inside, and I think the smell of food is the least of your worries. I compare this to women dressing skimpy on a club night. Just cause there are rapists doesn't stop the women from dressing light, you just need to be prepared to prevent the rape.

In that type of environment you will need to insure safety, but at the same time, there are bigger issues. People will look and unless you can stop that looting it doesn't matter.

You will be left to hiding your food, and that is the only protection, and with that you can only hope they don't go donner party - cannibal that is. I think some would, you hear stories of eating human flesh - all zombie like - cropping up from time to time in history. If you are talking about millions of people dying of starvation the soilent green will be broken out by someone.

hard to imagine that on this planet without nuclear winter or similiar events.

Here are a few tips on soaking

1. Change your water - you can use the rice water to help treat diarrhea. 
2. Cook rice after soaking, it reduces the cooking time, cooked rice taste better and probably has more food value than soaked rice.
3. Fermented rice is pretty good for you, and it tastes good cooked, has more flavour than unsoaked/fermented rice.

It reminds me of farmers practice during the holodmor (ukrainian genocide). You need to hide your grains to prevent them from being taken.

The real problem is if they find you and not food. They are living somehow.


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## Prepadoodle (May 28, 2013)

I saw an ad for buckets of survival food that included stickers identifying the contents as paint. Who would open a bucket of paint?

It's rare to walk past a house and smell anything. OK, if the windows are open you can sometimes smell cooking, but not usually. On the other hand, it's easy to smell a cookout. This suggests you should cook indoors.

If you are on the move and have to cook out in the open, do it away from your main camp and keep the cooking time to a minimum. Cook your food and take it back to your main location to eat. Putting out an odor for 10 minutes is better than putting out an odor for 30 minutes. Even if someone smells it, it's gone before they can pinpoint the exact location, and once done cooking, I'll be gone too. If you camp in bear country, you probably already do this, but it's worth mentioning.

When camping, I never have a large fire. I would rather cook on coals than over an open flame anyway, so I light a handful of fast burning wood (like pine), let it die down to embers, and cook with those. 

Cook downwind of your camp location if possible. You wouldn't want someone following the scent to stumble through your camp.

At any rate, cooking would be a time to be on high alert.


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## 8301 (Nov 29, 2014)

I suspect that a starving human's sense of smell would become much more focused and better when smelling for food.

Still, I intend to cook although I'll try to keep it inside.

In addition keep in mind that a wandering human may keep a dog for company and defense. Dogs can learn to follow the scent of food.


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## tinkerhell (Oct 8, 2014)

Starving men are not dead men because they stay the hell away from armed men having a bbq


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## Medic33 (Mar 29, 2015)

my favorite place to hide food is in my belley


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## Slippy (Nov 14, 2013)

So you're wandering around looking for a tasty meal and you happen upon a dirt road, locked gate and multiple rotting heads sitting high atop gleaming finely honed American Made Pikes. You see multiple boobie trapped holes down a road with felled trees and dead carcasses. You sniff the air and detect ever so slightly the aroma of squirrel cooking low and slow. Your choices are simple;

A.) You turn around and leave. Rotting Heads on a Pike mean usually do not indicate that there is a Big Kahuna Burger Joint a mile down that road with a drive thru...
2.) You continue over and around a locked gate and maneuver carefully around the Pikes and various pits with spiked sticks covered in sewage so you can belly up to the bar for a tasty squirrel burger and conversation with the locals?

So let me ask you, do you feel lucky punk? Well do ya?


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## Medic33 (Mar 29, 2015)

actually the humans sense of smell is so we know what not to eat vs. what to eat.
that is also why our smell has a lot to do with taste.


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## sideKahr (Oct 15, 2014)

I asked this same question a couple of months back and was told, "It's the end of the world, eat it raw."

Seriously, though, I don't have a good answer to cooking in a populated area where people are hungry. I do plan on flattening my trash and storing it in the basement in plastic contractor's bags. That's as far as my thinking takes me.


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## Mad Trapper (Feb 12, 2014)

I always bring my wild edibles book. There is lots you can eat without cooking and most who starve are surrounded with things they could have eaten.

This is a skill, and the book is a learning tool to get you started. Try to do this every time you are out in the woods/backpacking. Learn how to identify and prepare what you can find. 

I bring some sort of bag when on hikes so I can bring the bounty home. One time was out fishing and no bags with me. Came upon a huge chicken/sulfur mushroom (covered a 15' fallen oak tree trunk). I took off my T-shirt, tied off the arms/neck, and filled it up. Dinner was mushrooms, wild leeks, and trout.

Meat and fish you will need to cook. Which means fire, smoke, and smells. Learn how to cook with minimal amounts of a small concealed fire. 

You can pit cook using coals and hot rocks. Everything goes in the pit and you cover it up. Various ways to do this, clam/lobster bakes done this way are wonderful. No need to be there or watch things while it's cooking.


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## OctopusPrime (Dec 2, 2014)

Lots of great comments to understand how many people will operate in SHTF. 

Personally I think bodies will be burned or buried and not left out to rot in the sun. Rampant disease would be the result of leaving bodies to rot in the streets, forest, ect. The same goes for excrement. 

Everyone has a differing view of SHTF of course so I am not discrediting any response here ^^. I look at the different wars and the great depression for guidance in how things may end up, and then I consider events like the colonization of the Americas when things went south and the colonists cannibalized the weak/dead. Evidence of cannibalization exist surrounding the Jamestown years of hardship.


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## Maine-Marine (Mar 7, 2014)

Slippy said:


> So you're wandering around looking for a tasty meal and you happen upon a dirt road, locked gate and multiple rotting heads sitting high atop gleaming finely honed American Made SLIPPY Pikes. *The quality goes in before the name goes on, Buy three pikes get 1 hour of free marriage counselling* You see multiple boobie trapped holes down a road with felled trees and dead carcasses. You sniff the air and detect ever so slightly the aroma of squirrel cooking low and slow. Your choices are simple;
> 
> A.) You turn around and leave. Rotting Heads on a Pike mean usually do not indicate that there is a Big Kahuna Burger Joint a mile down that road with a drive thru...
> 2.) You continue over and around a locked gate and maneuver carefully around the Pikes and various pits with spiked sticks covered in sewage so you can belly up to the bar for a tasty squirrel burger and conversation with the locals?
> ...


Here fixed that for you


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