Date: 2015-11-23
To: View Entry
Miles today: 0.0
Weather: clear sky

It is the week of Thanksgiving, which seems to be an appropriate time to talk about hiking food. Roughly, I would divide food into 4 groups: breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks. Of these groups, snacks was the most important, at least to me.SnacksI started out with things like trail mix and beef jerky and while there is nothing wrong with either, they weren't a very significant snack source for me for very long. I pretty quickly decided that nothing could beat the convenience of bars for eating as you go and after a few weeks, at least 1000 to 1400 calories of my daily intake came from bars. I liked Cliff Bars, Builder Bars also by Cliff), Luna Bars, Lara Bars and, most of all Snickers Bars. I limited myself to one snickers a day most days (no idea why) and it was the highlight of my snack repertoire. Trail mix, while not very convenient (I thought) to eat while hiking, was still good to eat as part of lunch or dinner, or for a sit-down snack. Beef Jerky was just too low-calorie to bother with most of the time, and I only got it if I thought I needed protein and was sick of bars (which are all sweet). Another favorite sit-down snack was Skittles, which are pretty well impossible to eat while hiking, even if you don't care about eating them off the ground. I started out with a large quantity of Starburst candy, but the little wrappers were way too cumbersome to deal with and I never bought more after I finished my supply.BreakfastI started out with plans of cereal (dry) and did have grape nuts for breakfast a couple of times, but I soon decided that none of it was really appealing enough to mess with. By Tennessee, breakfast was usual some sort of pastry. Home made brownies if I was lucky, otherwise Honey Buns (calorie bombs and very useful in that respect, even if they did make your teeth feel like they were going to fall out of your mouth any day now), or Little Debbie-style apple or cherry pies. I cannot and will not eat oatmeal but if you like it, you can pretty much dig it out of hiker boxes for the entire hike. In fact, I think that's what Good Enough did! When it was cold at the beginning and end of the hike, I did usually make a cup of tea, and I also carried hot chocolate.LunchI discovered Ritz crackers early on in the hike and made them my lunch staple. If you get them in the single roll cartons, they don't break up too much, but I usually got them in a 4 roll carton, counting on half a roll per day for lunch. I would pair the crackers with tuna, sardines, prosciutto (still one of my favorite lunches), cheese, peanut or almond butter or nutella. A lot of people use tortillas in lieu of crackers and I did that once but was not that impressed. One of Sasquatch's lunches that he still talks about though is tortilla with beef jerky, which he optimistically called a Fajitas Taco and wished he had cheese for. I sometimes mixed the tuna with mayo, but towards the end couldn't be bothered with that. The flavored tuna is a lot more palatable than the plain if you there is no mayo. I always tried to find tuna in olive oil rather than water, but this was harder than it should be. In the second have of the trip, potato chips (usually crushed and eaten with a spoon) were a favorite addition to lunch or eaten as a sit-down snack. I consider them a perfect hiking food: light weight and calorie dense. I don't know why they aren't listed more often!DinnerI ate a fair amount of mountainhouse freeze dried meals. They taste good and are super simple. Plus, no clean-up, which I have to admit was a huge draw for me. I liked Beef Stroganoff, Spaghetti and meat sauce, chili mac with beef, chicken teriyaki, sweet and sour chicken and few more I can't think of. The Chicken and rice is not bad but a bit boring. The Pad Thai from Backpackers pantry is pretty good as well, as is the mushroom risotto from meals to go. Those meals do get pricy if that's all you do, so I also occasionally ate ramen noodles and mac and cheese. I liked the Annie's White cheddar mac and cheese because I'm a snob, what can I say. I did eat mashed potatoes a couple of times early on, once with freeze dried veggies added, but I found that every time I carried mashed potatoes in my food bag, I ended up not eating it. So, I quit carrying it after a while. I also liked to finish dinner with some sort of dessert, usually a piece of good quality chocolate (as opposed to the chocolate in say a snickers bar). And I often had tea or hot chocolate before or after dinner when it was colder. In the summer, hot chocolate was not appealing.I mostly carried food for 3-5 days, with 3-4 being far preferable than 5. Usually with 5 days, it only barely fit in my food bag, which is turn then barely fit in my pack. And I ate less than a lot of people on the trail, so for those people it would even be more food. I have been back home a couple of months now and have put most of the weight I lost back on. I still have cravings for pastry (cookies and things like boston cream donuts, neither of which I ever really ate before) and I don't want to think about eating tuna for a good while longer, but other than that, food is pretty much back to normal.