"Cooking" without heat

Heating in the sun is pretty much cool if you use some foil to get the rays concentrating.
Potatoes taste very good when they're raw (my kids eat most of them BEFORE cooking), and flour can also be quite edible if mixed with some water.
Rice would require some soaking in water if you wanted to prepare it without cooking.

But all in all, cooking is overrated (says a WriMo at the end of November :P). It's more necessary to kill off the germs in the food and preserve food longer, but not for actual making it edible.

[img]http://img139.imageshack.us/img139/2193/mybanner491ab4be02ac5ky9.jpg[/img]

Good stuff, more ideas please as this will be a major issue in my novel. Here is the research blog:

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A central problem my characters have to worry about is a lack of fire/gas. They are in essentially a large refugee camp whose every resource comes from outside. How do they prepare food without fire?

While researching this, I came across some interesting things:

First, it’s not an easy topic to find information on. Virtually all survival guides assume fire, or the ability to make fire.

Second, a thriving industry for pre-packaged survival kits:

On-line shop specializing in survival:
http://www.preparedness.com/
http://www.nitro-pak.com

Food pills (really):
http://www.preparedness.com/surfoodtab.html

Home/office/car/plane survival kits:
http://www.bestglide.com/Mainstay_Emergency_Rations.html

Third, some things that were interesting and started to paint a picture:

• Raw Foods -- this goofball branch of vegetarianism (and the experts who prove it is an unwise choice) have a lot of data on the health effects of eating uncooked food.
• Starvation -- thought perhaps there would be information if I looked at real-world starvation. Some interesting sub-topics
  Famine Scales (means of measuring famine): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine_scales

• Famine -- this proved an interesting thread. Looks like I will need to spend some time reading detailed individual accounts of dealing with famine.
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine

Fourth -- will need more research. Looks like the best bet to get this right will be to read some personal accounts of starvation (holocaust survivor accounts, some African accounts and some prison camp accounts), as well as starvation in literature: Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” for example.

However, that level of research has to wait for next month as I’ve already burnt 2 hours on this and have 5K words to go.

-McToad

Anything is possible,
few things are probable.

My blog (will continue after NaNo): Zombie Proof Fence

If you can burn it, you can make fire. Pioneers used to burn cow and buffalo droppings. Refugee camps would mean trash. Just have your characters hoard some of their trash and use it to make fire.

If your characters have access to flour and potatoes, they can ferment them to get alcohol and use that as fuel for fire, as well as to relieve the drudgery of the confinement.

Tanstaafl

there is a means of cooking with chemicals

see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceviche as an example

citrus acids are sometimes used to 'cook' foods, not with heat, but killing parasites and bacteria anyways... i hear that sushi or sashimi are sometimes prepared this way... maintains the 'raw' texture without the danger of disease... and ads some flavor besides...

in your setting, there may be similar alternatives

I am assuming you just don't WANT fire, whether or not they could actually make it or not. So I'll say that instead of searching for survival guides, you might look into "Raw diet" meals. I have several friends who never cook their food for HEALTH reasons, and they live "raw." There are all sorts of meals and things you can eat without cooking, including meats and things. Obviously these people are not eating this way due to the problems in your camp, but it may give you some great ideas for "cooking raw."

If you make a big parabolic mirror, point it at the sun, and hang something raw on a wire at the prime focus, it will cook surprisingly quickly. We used to make the mirrors out of lots of free AOL CDs.

It would probably help if you mentioned what equipment and such they _do_ have available there (primitive or otherwise) and the type of environment they're in. (After all, while you can theoretically make a fire out of the old "rubbing two sticks together", I doubt most modern people could manage that anymore.)

Title: Breaking Light
Goal: Finishing this novel. (Probably be 100k-120k at this rate.)
Sanity level: Do you even need to ask?