So I wrote this piece a few weeks back about Cold Prep, Vegetarian "Stir Fry" in a Cup. [1]
It's basically ramen soup that comes in its own cup, add water (tap or bottled) and pre-cut cold veggies and maybe a little salt, no cooking required, no heating of any sort required. You can use warm or hot tap water if available, but you can also use cold water. It works just fine with cold water, though you may like it better if it is a LITTLE bit warm if only because that's more normal for soup.
Since writing that piece, a lot of half-baked, semi-related ideas have been rattling around in my head and I don't quite know where to go with them. Nothing is quite gelling.
I looked up disaster preparedness info because this dish requires NO cooking and I find it to be a really healthy and satisfying meal. It's potentially something one could eat post-disaster when there is no power.
I also wonder if this is potentially something that could be brought in by disaster relief groups post-disaster. Not everyone would be okay with eating it, but a lot of people eat ramen and the veggies could be optional and you could potentially offer a CHOICE of different veggies.
It also makes me wonder if this would be something that could be done by free meal sites serving poor and homeless folks in the community. Give them their choice of ramen soup flavor, their choice of veggies to add to it, maybe in this case even have HOT water available, like in a carafe, the way you can make hot water available for tea or coffee.
When I was homeless, another homeless woman once said to me something like she wished they would just give out a sack lunch to take with you at breakfast at the women's center. She was talking about taking the bus up to a particularly library with long hours and having to be ON SITE to get a hot lunch was not serving her goals well for solving her problems so she could try to get off the street.
I agree with this. A hot breakfast with hot coffee can be a wonderful way to start the day -- or even a cold breakfast with hot coffee -- but doing lunch at a homeless services center was generally an imposition on my time for a not very satisfying experience.
Meals at homeless service centers or free meal sites are frequently not that healthy. They often use whatever gets donated to them and often operate on the idea that having SOMETHING to eat is better than having NOTHING to eat BUT I was on the street due to a serious medical condition and eventually concluded that fasting when I was MOSTLY adequately fed was better than eating the WRONG stuff just because it was free.
My medical condition comes with serious dietary restrictions and a lot of free foods are foods that exacerbate my condition. While homeless, I heard someone with diabetes say something similar -- that her condition was getting worse because of the foods she was getting for free and her inability to get hold of alternatives that didn't make her condition worse.
I found it really challenging to get adequate variety of fresh fruits and veggies while homeless and getting ahold of real butter -- something that REALLY helps my condition -- was nigh impossible at times. I used to fantasize about being able to buy a SMALL squeeze bottle (like 4 to 8 ounces) of ghee (clarified butter that is shelf stable and requires no refrigeration) and I used to fantasize about a world in which you could get just HOT WATER from a vending machine for a nickel or a quarter to add to things like ramen soup or instant oatmeal.
While homeless, it never occurred to me to try adding COLD water or warm tap water to ramen soup. If cold prep ramen became a fairly common thing in this world, that potentially begins to lower the barriers between homelessness and being housed in terms of lifestyle, which can help people cope more effectively with homelessness (because they are doing "normal" and familiar things while without housing) and can help reduce socially isolating stigma.
I would also like to see a world in which small rentals with kitchenettes were common. I would like there to be more of a gradient generally rather than some steep cliff separating The Haves from The Have Nots.
And I just think instead of having disaster preparedness info aimed at telling you what to stock SEPARATELY from your USUAL food stocks in case of disaster, we should educate people about things that work well as NORMAL food but is also shelf stable and disaster-friendly. If you have ramen on hand anyway and there is a big disaster, you try to use up the veggies in the fridge with your cold prep ramen as survival food that's completely NORMAL and something you might stick in your lunchbox if there hadn't been some big natural disaster.
I would like to see passive solar design homes become more common, including passive solar kitchens where you might have a zeer pot instead of a fridge -- or in addition to a fridge or freezer -- and people generally learning to shop for food staples and do food prep that is innately more disaster-proof than our current cultural norms.
Historically, a lot of food staples were staples because they didn't require cold storage. Noodles revolutionized diets the world over because they are shelf stable and only need to be tossed into boiling, salted water. There are endless recipes adding veggies, meats and/or sauces of various sorts to a base of noodles.
With cold storage and microwaves becoming common and full-time homemakers becoming less common, we have kind of moved away from that. It's fairly common for people to substitute prepared refrigerated or frozen foods that just need to be microwaved or similar.
I think we have become a bit too dependent on "convenience" items of that sort. We have erred too much in the direction of assuming our global economy and high tech world will always reliably serve us and then when there are supply chain issues, local large scale disasters, etc, we are less prepared than we used to be to cope.
The world used to be a much scarier, more dangerous and risky place and so a lot of human practices erred on the side of stability and surviving the worst case scenario. This drove a lot of, for example, gendered norms.
It is not serving us well to implicity assume we can RELY ON everything working. It's great when it does but the assumption that you can fosters design decisions and cultural norms that make the inevitable hiccups of life more costly.
This is absolutely not a best practice and potentially threatens to have society come unraveled.
It's basically ramen soup that comes in its own cup, add water (tap or bottled) and pre-cut cold veggies and maybe a little salt, no cooking required, no heating of any sort required. You can use warm or hot tap water if available, but you can also use cold water. It works just fine with cold water, though you may like it better if it is a LITTLE bit warm if only because that's more normal for soup.
Since writing that piece, a lot of half-baked, semi-related ideas have been rattling around in my head and I don't quite know where to go with them. Nothing is quite gelling.
I looked up disaster preparedness info because this dish requires NO cooking and I find it to be a really healthy and satisfying meal. It's potentially something one could eat post-disaster when there is no power.
I also wonder if this is potentially something that could be brought in by disaster relief groups post-disaster. Not everyone would be okay with eating it, but a lot of people eat ramen and the veggies could be optional and you could potentially offer a CHOICE of different veggies.
It also makes me wonder if this would be something that could be done by free meal sites serving poor and homeless folks in the community. Give them their choice of ramen soup flavor, their choice of veggies to add to it, maybe in this case even have HOT water available, like in a carafe, the way you can make hot water available for tea or coffee.
When I was homeless, another homeless woman once said to me something like she wished they would just give out a sack lunch to take with you at breakfast at the women's center. She was talking about taking the bus up to a particularly library with long hours and having to be ON SITE to get a hot lunch was not serving her goals well for solving her problems so she could try to get off the street.
I agree with this. A hot breakfast with hot coffee can be a wonderful way to start the day -- or even a cold breakfast with hot coffee -- but doing lunch at a homeless services center was generally an imposition on my time for a not very satisfying experience.
Meals at homeless service centers or free meal sites are frequently not that healthy. They often use whatever gets donated to them and often operate on the idea that having SOMETHING to eat is better than having NOTHING to eat BUT I was on the street due to a serious medical condition and eventually concluded that fasting when I was MOSTLY adequately fed was better than eating the WRONG stuff just because it was free.
My medical condition comes with serious dietary restrictions and a lot of free foods are foods that exacerbate my condition. While homeless, I heard someone with diabetes say something similar -- that her condition was getting worse because of the foods she was getting for free and her inability to get hold of alternatives that didn't make her condition worse.
I found it really challenging to get adequate variety of fresh fruits and veggies while homeless and getting ahold of real butter -- something that REALLY helps my condition -- was nigh impossible at times. I used to fantasize about being able to buy a SMALL squeeze bottle (like 4 to 8 ounces) of ghee (clarified butter that is shelf stable and requires no refrigeration) and I used to fantasize about a world in which you could get just HOT WATER from a vending machine for a nickel or a quarter to add to things like ramen soup or instant oatmeal.
While homeless, it never occurred to me to try adding COLD water or warm tap water to ramen soup. If cold prep ramen became a fairly common thing in this world, that potentially begins to lower the barriers between homelessness and being housed in terms of lifestyle, which can help people cope more effectively with homelessness (because they are doing "normal" and familiar things while without housing) and can help reduce socially isolating stigma.
I would also like to see a world in which small rentals with kitchenettes were common. I would like there to be more of a gradient generally rather than some steep cliff separating The Haves from The Have Nots.
And I just think instead of having disaster preparedness info aimed at telling you what to stock SEPARATELY from your USUAL food stocks in case of disaster, we should educate people about things that work well as NORMAL food but is also shelf stable and disaster-friendly. If you have ramen on hand anyway and there is a big disaster, you try to use up the veggies in the fridge with your cold prep ramen as survival food that's completely NORMAL and something you might stick in your lunchbox if there hadn't been some big natural disaster.
I would like to see passive solar design homes become more common, including passive solar kitchens where you might have a zeer pot instead of a fridge -- or in addition to a fridge or freezer -- and people generally learning to shop for food staples and do food prep that is innately more disaster-proof than our current cultural norms.
Historically, a lot of food staples were staples because they didn't require cold storage. Noodles revolutionized diets the world over because they are shelf stable and only need to be tossed into boiling, salted water. There are endless recipes adding veggies, meats and/or sauces of various sorts to a base of noodles.
With cold storage and microwaves becoming common and full-time homemakers becoming less common, we have kind of moved away from that. It's fairly common for people to substitute prepared refrigerated or frozen foods that just need to be microwaved or similar.
I think we have become a bit too dependent on "convenience" items of that sort. We have erred too much in the direction of assuming our global economy and high tech world will always reliably serve us and then when there are supply chain issues, local large scale disasters, etc, we are less prepared than we used to be to cope.
The world used to be a much scarier, more dangerous and risky place and so a lot of human practices erred on the side of stability and surviving the worst case scenario. This drove a lot of, for example, gendered norms.
It is not serving us well to implicity assume we can RELY ON everything working. It's great when it does but the assumption that you can fosters design decisions and cultural norms that make the inevitable hiccups of life more costly.
This is absolutely not a best practice and potentially threatens to have society come unraveled.