On a short day hike or weekend backpacking trip, your trail meals can be what your heart desires, but on a longer trip (a week or more), food planning can make the difference between a enjoyable hike and stomach- rumbling misery. This is based on my own experience (with improper meal planning), and though meal planning is a good rule of thumb, it will vary based off each individual hiker. Some of us often don't have the luxury of preparing our trail food at home, and will plan our meals on the fly eating whatever each trail town has to offer... (Mac & cheese, noodles, tuna, etc…). But if you have the luxury of preparing hiking food at home, the possible meal combinations are almost endless. When planning your meals for the trail, there are some basic elements that you should consider in preparing each day’s meals. These elements are basic, and we often apply these to our daily lives almost without thought. But deep in the wilderness, miles from civilization, they can often be a matter of life or death. Though this may be a bit of exaggeration on my part, it is close to the truth. When planning out each day’s meal, there are eight elements that I use; Calories, weight, nutrition, water, longevity, preparation, bears, and foraging.
Calories
Backpacking, canoeing, whitewater rafting (to name a few) all burns a lot of calories. Exactly how many depends on several factors; your weight, your fitness level, the amount of gear you're carrying, and exactly what you're doing in a day. There are several websites which will calculate calories burned for various activities but For the sake of simplicity, I will reference only one. http://www.caloriesperrhour.com . This site lists hiking with different pack weight categories, when hiking and backpacking. For example, a 130 pound person burns anywhere from around 350 cal/hr while backpacking, to as much as 530 cal/hr while climbing a hill with a heavy pack. These figures will vary with the degree of incline your climbing. So 10 hours of hiking would burn around 3500 calories, plus calories burned during those 14 hours at the end of the day’s hiking - say around 1000. So, roughly, you would burn around 4500 calories for a day of backpacking.
That seems like a lot of food . Fortunately, your average hiker or backpacker, can get a lot of that energy from their fat stores. After months of frequent hiking, some friends took a 10 day trip on the Appalachian Trail, they ate freely but kept track of their total calorie consumption on the trip. It averaged out to around 2500 calories per person-day, around half of what the website calculators said they should have burned.
The lesson here is, when your planning your food supply for a particular hike, you should never plan your food around a set formula. Each person is different, and you should plan according to your individual physical parameters. Your physical fitness, metabolism, stamina, terrain, weather , and pack weight all play a role in the calories burned during a hike. So plan your food supply around your individual needs, and then adjust accordingly as you go along. If you follow this formula, you will spend more time enjoying your trip, and less time hungry.
Weight
When planning your food menu for a backpacking trip, you want to carry food with the least amount of weight. In your pre-trip planning, spend some time researching the weight on different items that you normally eat during a hiking trip. This can be accomplished by a trip to your local grocery store with a pad and pen. Most food products have the weights right on the packaging, as you look at each item, write down the weight. After a couple a visits, you will have your own '”food Weight” chart based off your own culinary tastes. This could vary, as most backpackers will occasionally change up their menu trip-to- trip for some variety.
Nutrition
I am not a nutritionist. That being said, the calories in al foods come from either fat, protein, or carbohydrates. All three of these are important. Fat is the most weight efficient of the three, at 9 calories per gram, and is slow to burn. Fat is found in butter, oils, and nuts. Protein comes in at 4 calories per gram, is also slow to burn, and is needed for building and repairing muscle. Protein is found in meat, of course, but also in anything made of soy, beans, and nuts. Carbohydrates (sugars and starches) also give you 4 calories per gram, and are the quickest to burn - necessary for immediate and short term energy. Carbohydrates are found in any grain, sugar, or fruit. I try to carry as much fat as possible, to minimize weight, and based off trial and error have discovered that I can reasonably get about half my calories from fat. This includes body fat, however, not just fat in food - so at the beginning of a extended hiking trip my food has a smaller proportion of fat than at the end . Protein and carbohydrates I am still experimenting to find the proper balance, but I try to bring as much protein as is practical for its muscle-building properties. On my most recent hike I broke it into 40% fat calories, 40% carbohydrate calories, and 20% protein calories.
Water
Water is necessary to survive, but is also weight in your pack. On most long trips refilling water bottles is relatively easy, where food has to be carried for a extended time. In this situation the food should be as dehydrated to minimize its weight. However, on a short or desert trip you might be able to eat all your "wet" food before refilling water bottles. In this case, the water in the food is just substituting for water you'd have to carry otherwise in bottles, and is not making the food any less weight efficient.
Foods that are dry include any dried grains ,beans, flours, sugars, powdered drinks, dried fruits, nuts, jerky, oils and fats, and peanut butter (mostly fat). Foods that have a little more moisture content include; cheeses, jam, lunchmeats, and most breads. Foods with the most moisture-content are your fruits and vegetables.
Longevity
For a short hike in cold weather, most food will last long enough to eat. On longer trips, in warmer climates, or multi-leg journeys where food will be mail dropped from pot office to post office , non-perishable food is needed. Perishability can be approximated with water content. The less water something has in it, the less chance that it will rot. Also, animal fats (such as cheese and butter), will go rancid much faster than vegetable oils.
Preparation
There are two sorts of preparation to consider in hiking food - preparation at home before the hike, and preparation on the trail. Store-bought hiking foods, such as dehydrated meals and energy bars, are the ultimate convenience food. No preparation at home or on the trail. The downside is they're usually expensive, and have a lot of unnecessary packaging. And despite what they advertise, dehydrated meals aren't any more weight efficient than what you can buy off the shelves at a grocery store. Energy bars do have a lot of vitamins and minerals that would be more difficult to fortify your food with at home . I usually bring a few of these, along with a good multi-vitamin, for that reason. I get most of my calories from trail snacks, such as trail mix, peanut butter crackers, granola, breads, and fudge. This is inexpensive, and is convenient on the trail. However, some of these things take time to prepare, and your choices are usually limited than with cooked meals. So I supplement my trail snacks with single pot meals. I bring food (usually a combination of a fast-cooking grain, dehydrated noodles, and spices) that can be thrown in a pot of boiling water, cook quickly, and eat. Different grains, beans, and spices give a wide range of possible meal combinations, the single pot eliminates the need for extra cooking supplies, are usually inexpensive, and a hot meal is always nice at the end of the day’s hike.
Wildlife
The wildlife you may encounter in the areas you will be hiking should be a consideration in your meal planning, especially bears. Usually not a concern, but in some areas of the country, they're an important consideration. For example, when hiking in Alaska, try to minimize the smell of your food to avoid attracting them. Cheese, fish, and meat have a strong odor, so I leave those at home. Also, any time you're cooking, the smell will carry much farther, especially on windy days . When cooking on the trail , try to do it in the middle of the day (usually mid-afternoon), far from any potential campsite. You should also store all food and scented items in bear proof containers while in camp (government mandated in bear country, and required to have one in order to get your permits).
Foraging
I include this in my meal planning because a light-weight fishing kit is always a part of my pack, and is a source of enjoyment while on the trail. The trail can be kind to you, but you have to have the necessary skills in order to properly identify wild edibles.. The wilderness is not empty of food, and people have survived in almost every region of the world on the available resources there. It is perfectly possible to travel without bringing any food if you know what you're doing. There are a variety of schools which teach these skills, but are usually expensive and time-consuming. But, unless you are confident in your identification ability, I would not recommend it to your average hiker.
In closing I will make a brief reference to the movie “Into The Wild”; based off a true story, where he survived for years in the Alaskan Wilderness, surviving off what nature had. Then he made one error that cost him his life by improperly identifying a edible plant. So eat hearty and enjoy the trail, but always stay within your abilities.
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