Carry Your Weight - Food, Glorious Food!

After your base weight, food, water, and fuel make up the rest of the weight in your pack. Food weight is likely to be the heaviest of the three, at least for the first day or two out. Properly managing food weight will help the most out of the three consumables to keep your top pack weight to a minimum. However, you need to make sure you eat enough, otherwise you will fatigue too quickly and the day will be a lot harder.

The general rule of thumb used for food is 2 lbs of food per day. This includes all meals and snacks for the day. The trick is to pack as many calories as possible into that two pounds as you can, while still eating enough vitamins and minerals to remain healthy. And enough calories to fuel your body.

First up, here's two things to avoid while preparing meals for a backpacking trip.

1 - Avoid food with a lot of water in it. Water is dense at 2.2 lbs per litre, and has no nutritional value and zero calories. Fresh fruits, vegetables, and canned goods are heavy for what you get and should be avoided as the main part of your food supply. Roslyn and I bring some fresh food on day 1 when it will keep but after that everything should be as low water content as possible to keep weight down.

Leaving water out means using dehydrated or dried foods, and adding water to them on trail. This method works best if you can camp near water sources so that you don't need to carry water with you to make your meals at camp. If you do need to dry camp you can plan to have a supper that doesn't require water that night to minimize your water weight.

2 - Avoid eating just sugars. While candy, chocolate bars, and sweets can be low in water weight and high in calories they lack other nutrients and sugar is technically a toxin. Your body does not want to consume an all sugar diet, and even though you're getting a lot of calories you will not feel good or energetic. Sugar also acts as a minor diuretic due to your body trying to flush it out of your system, this means you will have to consume more water than normal to remain hydrated. Take some candy as a snack or morale booster, but don't make it your main source of food.

With those out of the way, here's some examples of what Roslyn and I typically bring for food.

Breakfasts

In a lot of cases we don’t bring breakfast. We find it slows us down and I don't lie eating in the morning. When we do bring breakfasts, they are usually 2 instant oatmeal packets each, or about 1/2 cup of dry oatmeal. We have also brought breakfast bars, and usually 2 of those is enough for breakfast.

Both oatmeal and breakfast bars tend to have a good blend of calories, vitamins, and sugar. They also don't have much water. The oatmeal will need to be either cooked with water or cold soaked, and most backpacking bars are pretty dry.

Lunch

Lunch on day 1 is almost always some cheese and 1/3 of a garlic sausage each (2/3 of a sausage is used). Lunch on day 2 and 3 is either beef jerky and cheese, maybe a bagel and cheese, or some bars and cheese. Cheese keeps well on trail for 2 to 3 days depending on temperature. The garlic sausage gets completely eaten day 1 between lunch and supper each trip because its heavy, but it's one of our luxury items.

Supper

For supper we either eat instant ramen noodles, instant mashed potatoes, or side kicks packages with dehydrated veggies flakes. On day 1 we treat ourselves and dice up the remaining 1/3 of the garlic sausage and throw it in too. We either eat 1 ramen or side kicks each or split 1 package of instant mashed potatoes. All of these meals need water added to them and are okay cold soaked if you don't want to bring any fuel (or if you forget it!).

Snacks

Since we generally skip breakfast and our meals are on the ‘light’ side, we usually bring at least 3 snacks per day each. We will have 2 cliff bars, 15 to 20 pieces of gummy candy, and some trail mix/nut mix/muchies mix each per day. We eat a cliff bar about an hour into the day, and then snack of the candy and trail mix as we go. If we are really hungry we eat the extra cliff bar at the end of the day.

Flavoring

To help make the food more interesting, we also bring some ways to flavour them. Spices packets and flavoured tuna packets work wonders on making 20 cent ramen packets taste amazing, and they are usually either inexpensive or easy to make yourself. We also try to bring either Mio or some water crystals to flavour our water occasionally as well as tea and hot chocolate powder for a nice evening drink.

So that's a break down of how plan our meals, with an eye on keeping weight down. We find that the 2 lbs of food per day rule of thumb is a pretty accurate metric to go by as long as you are taking low water weight foods. Unfortunately, this means that a 4 day trip adds 8 lbs of weight to your pack, putting Roslyn and I up to around 26 lbs, 18 lb base weight and 8 lbs of food. Once water and fuel are added in we start getting pretty close to the 30 lb limit we want to stay under.