Makeshift Grill Ideas: Cooking When the Grid Goes Down
By Pat Henry | The Prepper Journal
In my quest to think of creative (hopefully) ideas for articles on the Prepper Journal, I try to pull inspiration from a lot of places. Certainly my own efforts at prepping give me experiences that I can use to share information but I also read books, magazines, watch movies and TV shows and anytime I see something that I think would make an interesting or useful post idea, I write it down. There is a note page on my phone specifically geared toward post ideas I have had over the last almost two years now, and as I write on a topic I erase that from the list of ideas. Fortunately for me, the list is never empty but sometimes I will have a great idea, but not the words for an article. This post is a little different because it won’t be overly wordy but will hopefully share some ideas with you on makeshift grills that you can use to cook food if the grid goes down.
I was inspired to write this post while watching my favorite TV show, the Walking Dead. My wife and I only watch one TV show and this one, while I know it doesn’t appeal to everyone, is great in my opinion. It isn’t that I believe that flesh eating zombies are in our future, but the writing is creative and the scenarios the characters face are exactly the same (minus the walking dead) as any apocalyptic vision you can imagine. Take out the zombies and imagine a world after an economic collapse or pandemic and you would have similar problems as the characters in this show I think. Regardless, I like the show and frequently get ideas from it. They have also been showing more actions the characters take this year as the characters go about surviving as best they can without many modern conveniences.
I got the idea to write about makeshift grills from a recent episode. All cooking that happens in the Walking Dead is usually done over an open flame. If we have TEOTWAWKI we will all need to be more resourceful. Even if the whole world isn’t thrown for a SHTF loop, natural disasters like the 2011 Fukushima Tsunami victims pictured above demonstrate the need to improvise from time to time. Below are a series of photographs that I found illustrating several creative methods for cooking without the benefit of a stove top range or what we all might be faced with at some point and find ourselves cooking when the grid goes down.