About
Eating Offgrid is about cooking well from long-life ingredients: canned, dried, jarred and vacuum-packed. It is written for people cooking in vans and tents, and for households that keep a sensible cupboard.
The premise is gastronomic rather than survivalist. Most of this category exists to sell buckets of freeze-dried food, and its cooking advice tops out at "stock up on beans and some spices". Herbs, spices, acid and fat are the point here. They are the difference between a good dinner and macro-heavy ballast.
How it is researched
Nothing in the safety reference is written from memory. Every claim is quoted from a named authority, whether the Food Standards Agency, NHS, UKHSA, nidirect, the FDA or the US National Center for Home Food Preservation, and cited with the date we read it.
Where a figure cannot be sourced, we leave the gap and say so on the page. There is no safe holding time given for cooked food without a fridge, and no multiplier for how much worse slow cooking makes kidney beans, because we could not source either. Numbers invented to fill a gap read exactly like numbers that were researched, which is what makes them dangerous.
Ingredient nutrition comes from McCance and Widdowson's Composition of Foods Integrated Dataset (Public Health England, Crown copyright, Open Government Licence v3.0). Each ingredient records which entry it was matched to, so an approximate match is visible rather than implied.
How recipes are labelled
Two tags, and a recipe carries one only when it has earned it. Adapted means an established dish converted to shelf-stable ingredients, with every substitution and its reasoning shown on the page. Reviewed means made, photographed and dated, with notes on what went wrong. A recipe with neither tag has not been through either process, which the disclaimer says plainly rather than every page repeating it.
There are currently 196 recipes, 14 safety articles, 21 guides and 150 ingredients. None of the recipes has been through the Reviewed process yet. Recipes with no tag stay on the site but are kept out of search engines until they earn one.
How it is funded
Through Amazon affiliate links on the kit page, which are labelled at the top of that page. If you buy something after following one we earn a small commission at no cost to you.
There are none in the safety reference and there never will be. The build refuses to publish one, and refuses a safety page that links into the kit pages either. The site sets no cookies and runs one third-party script, a cookieless page-view counter; see privacy and cookies.
Who runs it
Eating Offgrid is edited by Leon Mallett, who cooks this way himself, mostly on the road, which is why the trip constraints come first on every recipe. He decides what is published, and only he can mark a recipe Reviewed. The site is published by Captivated Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales, of which he is a director.
Tell us we are wrong
Corrections are the whole reason for citing sources, and we would much rather hear about a mistake than not, particularly anywhere in the safety reference. If guidance has changed since we read it, tell us and we will check it against the source and update the page.
See also the disclaimer, which covers what this site is not.