During an emergency, it's especially important to keep your cooking area clean and food sanitary. If you aren't careful, harmful germs can spread to food and make you sick or animals can destroy or eat your food. We have some tips for how to best keep food sanitary during an emergency or even during camping trips:• All food scraps should either be burned or buried in a pit far from your living area to keep bears and other wild animals away from you.
• Keep all of your food covered and off the ground. You may keep your food in a tree, but be sure tree dwelling creatures can't get into it.
• Place lids back on on water bottles and other containers immediately after use.
• Do not wash your dishes in the area where you get your drinking water supply. Instead, wash your dishes away from a stream.
• Use clean dishes or eat out of the original food containers to prevent the spread of germs.
• Wash and peel all fruits and vegetables before eating.
• Prepare only as much as will be eaten at each meal.
With a little knowledge and preparation, you can stay clean and healthy, even during an emergency situation.
14 comments
Wade
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coldmouth143
This is so helpful, thanks for the tips!!
Jillana
This is awesome stuff! Thank you for posting such clear and simple steps we are to take if we are faced with this type of situation. Knowing how to use bleach to make water safe to drink is a big one as well.
Bruce
Having a supply of quart and gallon zip top bags helps with sanitation. Scraps go in quart size each meal then compress. All quarts put in gallon bag to pack out leaving no trace and no contamination.
Robert
Scouting taught me a lot of this, and I am glad to get the refresher here. I remember the important lessons we were taught about dish washing when outdoors. Good rinsing is important because soap and detergent residue can cause intestinal distress. We were encouraged to use a 3 bucket approach to cleaning our dinner ware. 1 bucket for soapy water washing, 1 bucket for rinsing and the final bucket was a bleach/water sanitizing dip. Worked great!
S. L. Haynes
These are great tips. Food born illness can devastate a group in a survival situation.
Rifle Fam
I wouldn't have thought to peel fruits & veggies—probably would have just washed them like I normally do. Thanks for the tips.
kmogilevski
Great tip about washing dishes away from where you get your drinking water. I didn't even think about this.
Lex-a-roo
Wow, I learn so much for this blog.
TLCSays
My son recently went through the tornados in Alabama. It was scary, but he's fine. We had just placed our first order, and after that we realized that we weren't prepared at all. Thank you for all the info and helping us be prepared.
H Reed
Good points, people often dont think of food scraps as garbage and tend to just throw them out on the ground, seeing them as "biodegradable" forgetting that they can atract all sorts of pests from incests and vermin to bears.
Misty
Thanks for the info, it's always good to have a refresher course!
AmyWW
Thank you for this information! Most of it is simple common sense, but I did not know about washing dishes away from streams.
Scarlett
Great tips, the Tornadoes have sure been bad lately. I lived in Kansas most of my life, and while we prepared for the storms. We didn't store food and water. I know now that was silly. We did get a 55 gallon drum for water recently and I feel much better having my food storage. I think every emergency kit needs to contain food and water.