Food: Lightweight and Energy-Packed

Pizza and Beer – Splurge or Core?

Lightweight Food

So you get ready to strap on the feedbag at the end of a long hike. What’s on the menu? Veal scaloppini?  Mac and cheese? Lemon chicken? Lasagna and meat sauce? I submit to you that the need for a hot meal is far overrated when it comes to cost, in terms of weight, and benefits, in terms of high-quality food, when you are miles from the nearest trailhead.

Backpackers are a strange lot. They seek out any weight savings possible. They will cut the handle off a toothbrush to save weight. However, when it comes to food, the norm is to carry a lightweight camp stove and dehydrated packets of varieties of foods. Many simply refer to them as “Mountain House” in deference to the king of dehydrated food…sort of like “Starbucks” is to coffee. This is not a consistent way of behaving…

Dehydration Anyone?

There are two reasons I don’t subscribe to the joys of dehydrated heat-and-serve meals. The first is simply the added weight presented by such fare (work), and the second is the poor quality of energy provide by those meals. Combine those two key reasons with the idea that any food preparation (work) requires cleaning (work) and is just generally a hassle and waste of time, and this is why I choose to simplify.

I’m pretty sure many will challenge me on my key reasons. For starters everyone knows that dehydrated food is the lightest you can possibly carry. It only makes sense, as it is free of useless water. But, if you only compare dehydrated food to some of the others on my list, the food itself is actually heavier, based on calories contained. Add in a camp stove and dishes, and now you are packing real extra weight. The important metric here is grams of weight packed per calorie of energy available in the food.

Another Path to Travel?

Take a look at Table 1 on the following page. You will see that the foods highest in energy (kilocalories) per grams are actually natural foods you can eat whole without preparation. Macadamia nuts, coconut, and coconut oil are among the most calorie-dense foods in relation to the actual weight of the food. Now, you can see that Mountain House Breakfast Skillet will rival these natural foods (most of the dehydrateds will not), but you will have to carry the camp stove and cook pot required to heat it.

The second reason I prefer to pack the lighter, denser natural foods is the quality of energy they contain. Dehydrated foods tend to be primarily carbohydrate-rich foods. These kinds of foods have their place in our diet and in the diet of performance athletes, but when it comes to long days of hiking, foods that are rich in fats and proteins with moderate/balanced levels of carbohydrate will both create a better fuel for your body and cause your body to consistently rely more on your existing reserves of stored fat, helping you to feel energetic throughout the day without massive pangs of hunger.

The important metric here is grams of weight packed per calorie of energy available in the food.

How Much Food?

It is pretty unreasonable to expect that you will be able to rely entirely on your consumption of food to provide your body with enough energy to hike for long days over multi-day trips. In other words, don’t expect to gain weight while hiking. You will have to draw on your body’s own fat reserves, as it is very difficult to ingest too far north of 3,000 calories per day, while it is also inevitable that your day-long activity will burn thousands of calories more than your normal daily at-home burn rate. Therefore, you will need to burn your fat reserves while hiking. Foods that are high in carbohydrates interfere with this process, confuse your body, and cause you to “bonk” and go hypoglycemic more often. You metabolize foods higher in fat more efficiently right along with your own fat reserves.

So, my rule of thumb is to do my best to ingest about 3,000 to 4,000 high-quality calories daily while I’m in the backcountry. This pretty much assumes that I’m not hiking the Pacific Crest Trail for 90 days…we are talking about multi-day trips here, not multi-week trips. For much longer trips, you cannot rely on burning of fat reserves each day. You will have to either take rest days, increase food consumption, or some combination of the two. Check out Table 1, comparing foods and packed weight for 3,000 calories.

Table 1 – Food and Weight Comparisons, Based on 3,000kcal Intake

* Based on 3,000 calories per day during activity, not including hardware to prepare/eat.

What About Weight? – Lightweight Food

Table 2 shows the weight savings of sticking with foods that don’t require preparation. Generally, if you prepare carefully, you can create a menu that equates to about a pound of food per day, maybe a tiny bit more. However, if we look at a five-day trip and carry the hardware to go with the dehydrated foods, and assuming you are camped next to a water source so are not needing to pack extra water, you will see that you will be packing just about 1.7 pounds per day. For a five-day trip, unprepared foods represent a weight savings of about 3.5 pounds. That is about equivalent to an extra tent!

Don’t get me wrong, if someone wants to pack and prepare lasagna with meat sauce for me, I will take that over nuts, seeds, and coconut most times, but if I have to lug it around myself, I’m going to stick with the light, high-quality foods that allow me to keep my pack as light as I possibly can. As a side benefit, I get out of cooking and doing dishes! If all I cared about was pure weight:calorie ratio, I’d choose pretty much straight coconut oil, but there are some extremes to which even I understand there are seriously diminishing returns!

Table 2 – Weight Comparison for Multiday Trips

So, take this with a grain of salt. If you are smart about packing nuts, chocolate, coconut, coconut oil, and a few other foods (e.g. Payday, Snickers, jerky) that you can eat without preparation, you will create a huge weight savings for yourself. You will also help your body to burn its own fat, once it is in a smooth aerobic fat-burning mode. Finally, nothing could be simpler than avoiding the cooking and cleaning associated with the prepared foods. With this kind of weight savings, I might even leave the handle on my toothbrush just to be silly.