I've been thinking
more about
disaster preparedness
recently , and an important piece of that is food . And for many
foods, before you can eat them you need to cook them. For example, a
large fraction of the calories in our house are dry rice and pasta.
These have ungelatinized starch, where the nutrition is bound up very
tightly in starch granules. We mostly can't digest these as-is, but
heat and water gelatinize the starch and make it bioavailable. [1] This means you need some way to heat things up. If the power grid is
working then you have lots of options, including immersion heaters and
boiling water with a kettle, but in many disasters this is not an
option. What else can you do? Various options with fuel and batteries are possible, but a solar oven is
hard to beat. Most would have what they'd need to put one together
from tinfoil, cling wrap, tape, and cardboard. It would be worth
putting some effort into identifying the best DIY-from-on-hand designs
and distributing them. A simple one probably can't get water to the
boil, but luckily you don't need that for starch: 180F is enough, and
even 160F gets your pasta about halfway bioavailable. You do want to
pre-soak, though: as starch gels it becomes less permeable to water,
and without stirring or boil to disturb the surface gelling it may not
fully hydrate. The main limitation of a solar oven is, of course, lack of sun. When
I look at a place like Boston, though, you should be able to cook a
pot of pasta on ~60% of days (~30% in the winter). If you have a mix
of foods, including starches that can be eaten without heating, like
crackers, cereal, and ramen, you can probably just eat those when
there's not enough sun for the cooker. Alternatively a propane stove
does pretty well: if you pre-soak, bring to the boil, turn the stove
off, and move to an insulated container, you should be able to cook
several hundred pounds of pasta with a standard 20lb propane tank. [1] Now, our stomach isn't the only way to get nutrition out of food:
it can also be fermented in our guts. The best case is that you grind
it and soak it well before eating. The gut bacteria would need time
to adapt to the challenge (replicating to handle the newly abundant
food) and while they're adapting it wouldn't be easy gastricly. You'd
want to ramp up to this, using it to stretch more bioavailable food so
it would last longer while giving our intestines the time to
adjust. Then the caloric content is also lower: half to the bacteria
doing the fermenting (or lost as uncomfortable gas) and half to you in
now-digestible form. On the uncomfortable gas, it looks like it should be worst initially,
and then go down as bacteria propagate that can consume the gas.
Whether the gas level (and other gastric symptoms) is tolerable is
probably a good gauge for whether the ramp is too steep. It won't
drop to nothing, though, and how well it works depends in part on your
gut microbiome: if you don't have the appropriate bacteria initially
it may never adjust well. Overall, this really doesn't sound like a good time. Then add in that
there's some risk of food poisoning from raw grains that are expected
to be boiled before eating, and it seems best to find another way. Comment via: facebook , lesswrong , mastodon , bluesky
Gelatinizing Starch in an Emergency
Brief
Gelatinizing Starch in an Emergency argues that making dry staples (rice, pasta) edible after a grid outage requires heating to gelatinize starch — not necessarily boiling: roughly 160°F gives partial bioavailability and ≈180°F is sufficient. The author recommends low‑tech solar ovens assembled from tinfoil, cling wrap, tape, and cardboard and notes that in Boston such solar cooking is feasible on about 60% of days (≈30% in winter). Because starch gels form surface barriers, pre‑soaking and occasional stirring or a short boil improve hydration. As an alternative, a standard 20 lb propane tank can prepare several hundred pounds of pre‑soaked pasta if you boil, then insulate. Relying on gut fermentation after grinding/soaking can recover calories but typically transfers ~50% to microbes, produces gas while the microbiome adapts, and carries food‑safety risks.
Why it matters
Published 2026-06-24 by an unknown author, the piece recommends DIY solar ovens (tinfoil, cling wrap, tape, cardboard) to gelatinize starch so dry rice/pasta become digestible at only ~160–180°F.
Key details
- Solar cooking in a place like Boston should reach sufficient temperature on ≈60% of days overall and ≈30% in winter; because solar ovens rarely boil, pre-soaking and stirring (or a brief boil) help full hydration as starch gels.
- A standard 20 lb propane tank can cook 'several hundred pounds' of pre-soaked pasta if you bring water to a boil, turn the stove off, and transfer the pot to an insulated container.
- Grinding/soaking and relying on gut fermentation can make starches partially usable, but about half the calories go to microbes (or are lost as gas), adaptation may be slow or fail depending on your microbiome, and food-poisoning risk from raw grains remains.