Food And Recipes

Food And Recipes

Some weasel took the cork out of my lunch. — W. C. Fields

Mustard’s no good without roast beef. — Chico Marx

Food, the eternal problem. There are two types of food you need to consider for lightweight backpacking. We’ll call these pre-packaged and fix-yourself. These aren’t your traditional food groups, but then you aren’t doing a traditional sort of thing, so you need to warp your perspective to fit. You are now hanging out with the lunatic fringe, so get bent, Sucka.

Experts are still getting into hissing hair-pulling fights about how many food groups there are, and even whether there ARE food groups, so cut yourself some slack and try to have more fun. Get out more. Meet some new people. Spend all your allowance in one place. Eat something with tentacles. Whatever. Live a little, for crying out loud.

Food Groups

The Mayo clinic swears that there are six food groups:

1. Vegetables
2. Fruits
3. Carbohydrates
4. Protein/Dairy
5. Fats
6. Sweets

The Center for Health and Athletic Performance disagrees. They drop vegetables and replace them with “vegatables”.

1. Vegatables [sic]
2. Fruits
3. Grains
4. Meats and Protein
5. Fats and Oils
6. Dairy

The National Dairy Council disagrees with both. They cut it down to five groups, all recognizable as food to the lay person. However, they say “vegetable” but not which one. Likewise for “fruit”, “grain”, and “meat”. You’ll have to guess which fruit, which grain and which meat. Let’s assume that they don’t mean weasel meat or cat milk. Oh, crap, why not? Put back the weasel meat and cat milk. It could be fun.

1. Milk
2. Meat
3. Vegetable
4. Fruit
5. Grain

The National Dairy Council does go the extra quarter mile (0.4025 kilometers) by providing a cute, though gender-stereotyped way to remember all five of their groups. “Mom makes very fine granola” reminds us that we should eat milk, meat, vegetable, fruit, and grain. Again, no indication of which milk, meat, etc. Use your best judgment. Just keep your hands off my weasel.

Extensive research on university campuses has revealed that graduate students (generally a very smart bunch of people, at least by some standards) recognize five food groups:

1. Caffeine Group (four to five servings daily)
2. Macaroni and Cheese Dinners or Ramen Noodles Group (one or more servings per day)
3. Pizza and Beer Group (occasionally) Note: these two items must be eaten together
4. Canned Group (one or more servings per day)
5. Cereal and Milk Group (one or more servings per day)

If that’s too hard to remember then cut back to four groups and hope for the best:

1. Sweet things
2. Salty things
3. Crunchy things
4. Liquids

Hikers have their own perspective:

1. Ramen Noodles Group
2. Vitamin I Group (Ibuprofen)
3. Chocolate Group
4. Any-Food-That-Is-Yogied Group

Being ornery cusses, some other hikers disagree, claiming that the groups are:

1. Dried Food Group
2. Snickers Food group
3. Town Food group
4. Beer Food group

If all of the above are too much for you, then keep it short and simple:

1. Froot Loops

Pick one of the above lists, memorize it so you can sound educated, then eat what feels right for you.

For short trips (up to two weeks) it doesn’t matter too much what you eat as long as you get enough calories. Two or three days seem like forever if you’re drooling, but even if you don’t eat at all, a couple of days with drool on your chin usually won’t kill you too much.

For longer trips, ya just gotta eat. Take enough food, and make sure it’s tasty. If you have to shove supper down your throat with a stick, or pay someone to do it for you, then you’re in trouble. Ditto if you throw food away because it makes you gag when you see it. Or even when you just think about it. These are sure signs of trouble.

Calories are the key, though. If you get enough calories then everything else lines up. Not enough calories and you have problems like frequent and uncontrollable stomach growls, weak knees, bad attitude. Terrible gnawing sounds as you sink your teeth into anything that can’t get away. And then your very own body will begin to digest itself.

First the fat goes, which is OK if you have side handles. You can do without those.

But your body needs more than energy. It needs protein to repair and build up muscles and keep everything shipshape. Guess where the fasting body goes for this protein? Right to its own muscles. Your body is so finely tuned for survival at all costs that it will begin to digest its own muscle tissue so it can build and repair that very same muscle tissue after digesting it.

Duh?

This fact alone is proof of the truth of evolution. No god, however arbitrary or stupid, would be dumb enough to come up with an idea like that. It would simply be too damn much work to invent a process like that and then to embed that much perverse stupidity right down in the very sub basement of life, and therefore it had to happen solely because it logically makes sense on its own, and developed as a survival mechanism way back when all of those noisy big ugly things were banging their heads together and eating each other, and some of the smaller, slimier and even less appetizing really nasty things were slithering hither and yon, wallowing (yes, that’s it — wallowing) in the swamps and so on, and came up with this plan for survival. And now it’s what we’ve got. Because nature is so efficient and perfect and all that crap. So we digest ourselves. Right.

If you just eat enough to keep hunger away, and sort of eat a variety of things, then you’re probably getting enough protein, carbohydrates and fats. You might come up short on vitamins and minerals, but you can take pills for that. You’ll survive the hike. Everybody does.

If you plan to hike the Appalachian Trail, the Pacific Crest Trail, the Continental Divide Trail, or one of the other long trails, you’ll be out for months — four or five or six months. This is a different universe and requires a different strategy. You may not be able to eat enough to keep going. Women usually lose weight and add muscle. Men usually lose both weight and muscle. The metabolic thermostat gets cranked up so high that it’s nearly impossible to keep going for months on end. You just can’t eat enough on the trail. Long distance hikers can slowly starve to death.

The good news is that while you may hike for months at a time, slowly dying of starvation, you’re never too far from a town. Long distance hikers typically hit a town at least once a week or so. When in town, they stay a day or two and pig out on “town food”, or what you and I generically call “food”. Lots of it. Leafy greens, fruits, vegetables, meats, sweet things, crunchy things, salty things, liquids, and all the rest. This refreshes the hiker and rebalances the body’s needs for vitamins, minerals, and everything else. Like calories.

There is a story about four long-distance hikers sitting in a cafe. The waitress comes over. One hiker orders two complete chicken dinners with a side order of onion rings, two Cokes and a milk shake, and two slices of apple pie with ice cream. As the waitress finishes writing this down she turns to leave. The other three hikers start waving their arms — “No, no wait! We want to order too!”

Or the story about a hiker at an AYCE (All You Can Eat) buffet who waddles out of the place after snarfing down enough food to keep three people and a dog stuffed for a week, ducks into a grocery store down the street and emerges with a quart of ice cream. Then he sits on the curb and eats it all for dessert.

Hiker Food Groups

So that brings us back to our two hiker food groups: pre-packaged and fix-yourself. Fresh food is pretty well out, except for the first day or two. An apple, a carrot, some doughnuts. You can carry a little fresh food but it’s heavy and awkward and it goes bad if you don’t eat it right away. It is neither a long-term solution nor an ultralight option.

Pre-packaged foods still have to be tweaked, but gnomes in food factories already did most of the work for you. Pre-packaged foods are foods like macaroni and cheese, pre-seasoned instant mashed potatoes, ramen noodles or boxed couscous or stuffing mix. (Some people stuff themselves with stuffing mix.) About all you need to do is repackage these foods into ziplock bags and add some seasoning. Or you can supplement them with bits of dried meat or dehydrated vegetables. If you go the freeze-dried food route, you’re not one of us, so we’ll skip ahead. Normal people can’t afford to pay $5 to $10 each for meals of chemical substances that have been exploded inside vacuum chambers by pricey, over-educated technical droids.

Fix-yourself foods are foods that you put together yourself. The difference between pre-packaged and fix-yourself foods is that you just repackage the former and add a little something to it, but start from scratch with the latter, and build it up into something. Both categories start with dry ingredients.

Dry food is good because it weighs less. With water at two pounds per quart (1kg/L), moist food is heavy compared to dry food, even in small portions. Dry food keeps better, and gives off fewer inviting aromas to attract hungry critters to join you for lunch. Or for midnight snacks. Or stealthily crawl into bed with you in the deep dark of night just so they can reverently sniff your breath and gently lick your lips and nose hairs.

Note that here we’re skipping foods that require lots of preparation or ingredients that are fresh or canned. We’re focusing on the light to ultralight end of the spectrum. If you want to get fancy there are whole books on the subject of outdoor cooking, but the ultralighter wants maximum munchability and minimum weight, so we’ll continue to look at light and simple things.

Meals made from dry ingredients inhabit a sparse universe revolving around starch. These are foods made mostly from grains. The exception to the grain rule is plain instant mashed potatoes. The basic, starchy ingredients are going to be rice, wheat, corn, barley, rye, or products made from them, like pasta.

Let’s take a simple example — couscous. You can buy couscous in bulk. By itself it isn’t much. It’s like uncooked, pelletized macaroni, so you have to work some magic on it. You get it home, then measure some out, and add spices and butter. Toss in whatever makes it most edible. I usually go with butter and grated Parmesan cheese. Can’t help it. Cheeeese, Gromit!

Cheese adds salt and flavor and keeps well. (Hard cheese like Parmesan.) Beyond that you can move on to onion powder and garlic powder, herbs, pepper, and dried bouillon. Once you mix all the ingredients, you bag them and then you’re done.

That’s a simple recipe. Most of them are. You want good eats, but mostly calories. You can play with corn meal, angel hair spaghetti, minute rice, instant mashed potatoes, bulghur wheat, and anything else that seems like it might work. Try it out at home in your own kitchen first, then on shorter trips and day hikes, then pick from your list of winners and make them your tried-and-true staples.

If it makes you gag, then maybe that’s a hint. Try it again if you like, but keep in mind the ancient proverb: “If you do what you did then you’ll get what you got.” Do not expect to like something on the trail that makes you feel dizzy, queasy, rancid, putrid or foul when you try it at home. Not even if it’s sex.

Exercises

1. Pick a fight with someone about how many food groups there are, what they’re called, and what foods are in them. You get extra credit for doing this with a complete stranger. Go to the head of the class if this actually results in a brawl. More points for serious injuries.
2. Buy a box of Froot Loops and try to determine whether it or they actually is or are a food or foods.
3. Have lunch. You deserve it. Try to appreciate where you would be without food. Whine less. You have it pretty soft, after all.