photo by stevendepolo via flickr Living on a sailboat in the tropics teaches a person many things: “tradewinds” does not mean 15 knots from the east all the time, stingrays are amazingly cuddly and eating food from stores doesn’t have to be awful. We’ve been living in a special kind of future for the past couple of weeks — there’s no grocery store but there is broadband internet. It’s a tough call whether the reverse would be preferable. But there it is. Due to a combination of events, we’ve been kind of stuck here, so I’ve gotten lots of recent practice with cooking from stores. We keep a good amount of canned food and other stuff that lasts on board, exactly because of situations like this. Even in places where there are supplies, sometimes the weather doesn’t let us get ashore or the shops themselves are out of things (the great Labasa butter shortage of ‘11, for example). So I know how to manage on not much. Here’s how a reasonable supply of emergency food can be made palatable: