No Fridge? No Problem! Preserve Your Camp Food With This DIY Hack

Spending time camping out in a beautiful location is a great way to reconnect with nature and yourself. However, if you are going to be out in the wilderness for an extended period, you will need to think about the correct way to store your food, because nothing is worse than being out in the middle of nowhere and sick with food poisoning. 

While coolers filled with ice can last a day or two and adding salt to the ice can help keep your food colder for longer, if you are looking at a week-long trip, you will need another solution. The problem with travel or camping fridges is that they are often bulky and require a lot of energy (usually through a battery, charged via your car or a generator). Luckily, if you don't want to deal with all that, you can easily make your own camp food refrigeration system using only a few inexpensive items — two terracotta pots, a lid, sand, and water.

In fact, this refrigeration system, often called a zeer pot or pot-in-pot refrigerator, is believed to date back to ancient Egypt. Today, the zeer pot is used as an effective and cheap way to cool food without electricity in many developing countries in North Africa and can keep vegetables good for up to three weeks. It's also a great eco-friendly alternative for campers looking for more sustainable and off-grid options, and is easy to make. So, how do you do it?

For the pot-in-pot refrigerator, you will need two terracotta pots with one smaller than the other so that the smaller one can sit inside the larger one with space in between the two. For this to work, it is important for both pots to be made of real clay or terracotta and for the outer pot to be unglazed. Before starting, you should first fill any holes in the bottom of the pots. Once this is done, you can go ahead and pour some sand into the bottom of the larger pot and then set the small pot inside the larger one on top of the sand. Next, fill the space between the pots with sand and carefully pour water into the sand between the pots until it is damp. Finally, cover your zeer pot with a lid or wet towel.

As the water evaporates from the sand, it chills the inside of the small pot creating a cold environment that will keep food fresh. However, because this method depends on evaporation, it only works in an area that is not very humid and has a consistent dry breeze. Furthermore, you will need to keep adding water to the sand to make sure that the process of evaporation continues and the zeer pot stays cold. Your zeer pot will also need to be kept in the shade and out of direct sunlight. As an extra precaution, you can always attach a thermometer inside your eco-friendly refrigerator and monitor the temperature which is an easy camping hack that will ensure your food is safe to eat.