In a disaster situation, money can easily end up devalued. Dollars won’t fill your belly, but that bag of beans will.

You’ll probably have a few odd food items that are incredibly valuable to someone else but not much interest to you. Let those trades happen naturally. You don’t want to waste a tremendous amount of energy on finding the best high value trades while your stomach is rumbling from hunger. Instead, you’re better off trading services for food. If you have a reliable way to cook without power, you have a reliable way to fill your belly. This allows you to trade cooking services for a portion of the finished food.

If you’ve built a brick oven, you can bake someone’s bread in exchange for one breaking off enough to leave yourself one roll for every loaf.

On a simpler level, if you have enough raw materials for a collection of solar cookers, you can feed yourself all day. One meal for you is a good exchange for cooking one pot of someone else’s food. Three of these equal a solid day of hot meals. Six is enough for you and a spouse.

In a disaster situation, money can easily end up devalued. Dollars won’t fill your belly, but that bag of beans will.

You’ll probably have a few odd food items that are incredibly valuable to someone else but not much interest to you. Let those trades happen naturally. You don’t want to waste a tremendous amount of energy on finding the best high value trades while your stomach is rumbling from hunger. Instead, you’re better off trading services for food. If you have a reliable way to cook without power, you have a reliable way to fill your belly. This allows you to trade cooking services for a portion of the finished food.

If you’ve built a brick oven, you can bake someone’s bread in exchange for one breaking off enough to leave yourself one roll for every loaf.

On a simpler level, if you have enough raw materials for a collection of solar cookers, you can feed yourself all day. One meal for you is a good exchange for cooking one pot of someone else’s food. Three of these equal a solid day of hot meals. Six is enough for you and a spouse.

Even if all you have is a simple wood fire, you put the effort into gathering and building it. Sharing it in exchange for a small, reasonable portion of food helps preserve your valuable stockpile longer while allowing someone else to have a hot meal, and possibly helping you nurture an ally.

That said, if you’re stationary, you run the risk of people taking what they want. Don’t try to enter into a service-based barter economy unless you are well armed and prepared to do whatever it takes to defend your resources. Never let the people you’re bartering with think they can simply take what they want. A well armed, polite, competent person will be well equipped to survive and thrive.