This is not a wilderness survival issue. I also don’t regard it as a short-term survival issue at all for the simple reason that I don’t think food is a very relevant short-term survival issue (for a healthy person fasting is not a big deal), and it’s sure as hell not a “bushcraft” issue. It’s not a historical reenactor’s issue, not a camper or backpacker’s issue if they are always going to stick to the wilderness, and it’s not an issue for people who won’t stray far from civilization into the wilderness, or won’t ever leave “developed” countries.
What I have in mind with regard to this issue are things like nomadics, “Adventure Travel” or Third World travel, like hosteling, like couch surfing, like crashing in dorm rooms or barns or beach shacks. Like vagabonding, or modern hoboing. Like real survivalists who want to have a chance in handling scenarios that don’t necessarily involve complete retreats to the wilderness or maybe less-than-total Apocalypse situations where just maybe the power isn’t off completely and forever- for instance, the “wolf” of widespread, long-term abject poverty that seems like it might be closer to our door than it has been since 1945…
But let’s stay on the positive side of hypothetical situations, there’s no real reason not to in discussing this. Let’s imagine, for just a bit, that you’re an unusually adventurous person. I’m thinking of Ben Stiller’s character in his recent version of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty when the character is knocked out of his rut (trust me, it grows on you, give it another chance- there are some depths there a lot of people miss).
For whatever reason, business, pleasure or obsession, you have decided to go on a trip. You’re not sure exactly what it’s going to take, you’re not sure how you’ll be traveling or by what means for at least parts of the trip, you’re not sure exactly what route you’ll end up taking or what you’ll encounter or maybe even how long it might take. You might be in hotel or motel rooms, or you might be in the wilderness somewhere, or anything in between. You might be eating fresh food off of a farm, or scavenged food, or supermarket or convenience store food or freeze-dried backpacking food. The one thing that you ARE certain of is that you’re going to need to be flexible and versatile.
The “gap” that I’m talking about is a missing link for this scenario, something that despite our high technology and materials science and engineering just doesn’t exist or just isn’t available somehow- we seem completely unable to create at least fairly-lightweight, portable, sturdy cooking vessels that work for all of our common means of heating food, not just fire and flame, not just stoves, but also microwave ovens.
Don’t dismiss it- try to name one. Can you name any material that works for cooking over a fire and in a microwave oven? All metals are out, nothing electrically conductive works in a microwave, the properties of electrical conductivity and thermal conductivity are pretty closely related- and thermal conductivity is highly desirable for every heating method besides microwaves. The closest I’ve been able to come up with is that old Corelle ceramic/glass cookware that was commonly available in the 1970’s, but trust me, there are reasons it didn’t catch on. I was there, I bought some while living alone for awhile- bad idea. There were only small pieces made, which was fine, and I didn’t care that it was a bit heavy for its size and I wasn’t too concerned about how sturdy it was, but it burned almost everything I tried to cook in it. It was EXTREMELY unforgiving about how you applied heat for anything beyond boiling water. My impression is that using borosilicate glass “labware” for cooking would be about the same.
The thing is, these days, you really do need to be able to use a microwave for complete flexibility. I was around when they were introduced, and I’ve witnessed their slow progress in being accepted, but now they’re everywhere. Again, dorm rooms, cafeterias, any shack that has electricity, basement apartments, convenience stores (it’s been a long time since I’ve been in a 7-11, but it at least used to be that if you bought something and nuked it nobody seemed to notice or care if you nuked another item as well, whatever the official policy might be), campers, trailers, boats, converted vans, the list goes on and on. For those times when you’re not “roughing it”, the capability to use a microwave is really almost a necessity, and while some venues might provide a few vessels to use one it’s a great convenience to have your own. For one thing, it enable you to heat food and leave without stealing anything, which might be desirable. If your microwavable vessel is also a container you can take the meal quite some distance if you need to, but even if it just seals or can be bagged you gain the flexibility of being able to pack it after you eat and leave and deal with cleaning it later.
So, given that no single material seems to fit the bill, and given that there are times when it might even be pretty essential to be able to use both open heat and microwave ovens depending on what’s available, it seems that the only viable approach is to carry both. At least, I think that’s where we’re at.
So, why does nobody make a kit to do that? Sure, anyone can just throw more containers into their pack or bag or suitcase, but shouldn’t something a little more sophisticated be available somewhere, from somebody, to use less space and add less weight, maybe provide more convenience and flexibility? There seems to be- almost nothing that spans the two requirements.
What I have in mind here are two containers of similar size and dimensions that nest together, one of metal for cooking over physical heat and one of an appropriate synthetic, maybe silicone, perhaps surprisingly, it seems to make not a great deal of difference which one is outside and which is in, but we’ll assume the metal one is in. This gives you the most commonly desired capability for “camp” cookware, to handle preparing some kind of semi-solid food and a hot beverage for the same meal. It doesn’t matter which vessel in the pair you’re using to heat/cook the food, you can use the other vessel to eat or drink out of but not to cook with. The food could be freeze-dried entrees or soup or stew or chili or breakfast cereal or innumerable other things, the beverage could be coffee or tea, or beer or wine or water or soda, doesn’t have to be hot for a drinking vessel to be highly desirable, we just want that option.
So, I’m thinking an outer pot of stainless steel (for sturdiness, good heat conduction and to save expense if weight isn’t a great consideration) or titanium (if weight IS a prime consideration), and an inner vessel of some sturdy microwavable synthetic. It would be nice if they both had lids of appropriate materials, for fuel efficiency in the case of the metal container and to help prevent spattering and boiling over in the case of the microwavable plastic. It would be great if both lids fastened to their respective vessels independently so that they’d also act as food containers, so that you could carry fresh or cooked foods in a pack or bag if that’s desirable. It would be nice if the metal vessel had folding side-handle(s) for cooking over stoves, but in my opinion it’s even more desirable for it to have a bail to enable the user to rig a way to actually control the applied heat of an open fire for doing a little real cooking as opposed to just boiling liquids. The inner plastic vessel doesn’t require either handles or a bail, but it probably needs some sort of insulating sleeve for handling hot contents.
Of course, this arrangement doesn’t exist. I’m not sure why. It’s certainly do-able. It’s true that MOST companies that produce metal “camp” cookware aren’t really set up to do plastics, but there are exceptions, they don’t both have to come out of the same factory and such things can be subcontracted.
The closest thing I’ve been able to find so far, and it’s not terribly close, is the Adventure Bowl + Spork Compact Cookset from Stanley, a company that does often combine stainless steel cookware with plastic eating vessels, though as far as I know none of the latter are overtly for microwaving or even listed as “microwave safe”. This is a 24-ounce (at least nominal) pot with side handles (no bail, no lid), and an inner plastic vessel. They don’t call the inner vessel “microwave safe” anywhere that I’ve seen, but it is obviously intended to handle boiling-hot liquids (poured from the metal pot) and it is listed as “dishwasher safe” without any mention of needing to be kept in the upper rack (which is sometimes a fact manufacturer’s don’t mention up front, only in the documentation after you’ve bought it). Objects in the lower rack of a dishwasher can be heated to above the boiling point of water by the heating element used to dry the dishes). In any case, it’s designed to withstand some heat and I doubt that it contains any metal. I did talk to one friend who had one and said he used to reheat his coffee in a microwave fairly often, and had no problems. I’m not sure which version he had (I’ll cover that).
There are also two little annoying “crap pockets” molded into the inside upper of the plastic vessel to hold a folding stainless-steel spork that nobody seems to much like.
The fact that there’s no metal lid for the stainless pot is a fairly serious compromise. The lid for the plastic inner vessel will drop onto the pot, but pretty certainly will melt if exposed to direct flame. That lid might also be a reason that Stanley decided not to list the plastic vessel as “microwave safe” is that there might be a tiny metal pin fastening the silly folding tab (like the one pretty much nobody likes on the ubiquitous Stanley 2-cup cook set). Who knows.
There have been at least two iterations of the product life cycle for this thing, it was originally released as the “Stanley Adventure Mountain cook set” with, according to photos, variously green or gray plastic parts. The seemingly-identical plastic parts of the current “Compact cook set” are black. In the past it’s sold for as little as $12, maybe less. The current listing on the Stanley website says it’s “out of stock” but gives the price as $28 (and the list price as $40).
In any case, it seems that it might be discontinued again. It’s no longer searchable at all on either the Amazon or Walmart web sites, it seems to be out of stock almost everywhere, and some vendors are starting to elevate the price of them, so if it’s not discontinued there obviously hasn’t been a production run in quite some time. I just ordered one off of eBay, mostly out of curiosity and to experiment with, so I should know more soon.
In any case, Stanley seems well poised to produce something like what I’ve described here if they chose to- though I’d really prefer titanium if possible (because of the current international situation continued civilian consumer-level availability of titanium seems VERY doubtful – I’d suggest getting what you need in the metal now).
Mainly because of their innovation and design, but also because I carry a mug and a bowl of theirs in my every-day kicking-around daypack, I keep thinking of Stojo (stojo.co) and their silicone vessels for mobile folks. Of course, they don’t do metals, so they’d have to subcontract (or be subcontracted by) someone who does that part, but their are LOTS of sources for getting metal pots made. There are other hurdles, their product line is fine-tuned for urban and suburban commuter requirements and less so for campers or backpackers, I’m not sure they have any interest in that market other than an occasional posed marketing photo of young people in rugged-looking clothing using the products around a campfire- and they seem to have a real phobia with regards to non-overtly-feminine colors. Even when they offered (mostly in the past, it seems) several colors it seems to be a LOT of pastels and only one or two “token” ugly colors like black or navy blue. Their current palette for the bottles, for instance, has a lot of pastels and not one but TWO pinks, one soft and feminine and one loud and insistent.
– Robert the Wombat