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It was the cooking of the dried beans that I was getting to.

I wanted to make the point that everyone needs to be prepared to cook those dried items with minimal fuel use.

Every prepper needs a pressure cooker, and a pressure canner, and all the canning materials, as almost a starting point of their (long term) preparedness.

Dried beans and wheat are the foundation of a true melt down scenario that would throw us into a starvation situation, but facing two hours of cooking time, for each meal, is of course impractical for most of us, actually all of us, because even those living in timber, don’t need the unnecessary physical effort of hand cutting firewood that they are wasting with excessive cooking.

It is imperative that people get those pressure cookers, and learn how to can dried beans while allowing the canning process to do the cooking for instance, which means that one complicated fuel gathering and cooking session can produce many quarts of canned beans for the shelf.

They need to learn that you can bring your beans, or wheat berries to a boil in a pressure cooker, turn off the fuel, and that the beans/wheat will cook on their own.

Learning thermos cooking is useful also.

“It was the cooking of the dried beans that I was getting to. I wanted to make the point that everyone needs to be prepared to cook those dried items with minimal fuel use.”

I have been concerned about that, too, that people buy gobs of dried beans and would run out of fuel or water to prepare them. Dried food takes water and fuel, it doesn't prepare itself. For a short time emergency, like 5 or so days without power due to a hurricane or other weather event, I have canned beans and instant rice along with other open the can and heat items like canned creamed soups with meat in it (those are Progresso soups and are delicious). Also have canned fruit for those times.

So, I have a short term emergency way to heat and eat using very little fuel. I have numerous ways to cook for a long term emergency and have way to have good water for as long as necessary. I'm sort of a Plan A/B/C/D person to accomplish a task so I can live as well as possible under dire circumstances.

You must have a really top notch pressure cooker. When I cook pintos, for example, I soak them overnight or until they are all swollen and non-wrinkly, rinse well, and then bring to pressure (mine is not fancy, doesn’t have any gauges), then put on low for about 40 minutes. Any less time and then are not done.

Different beans take less time; pintos seem to take the longest. Soaking is essential. I use a lot of quicker cooking legumes like split peas, lentils and mung beans. I soak them all, esp. the mung (24 hours).