Massive food consumption

imported
#1

Hey All,
Most of the posts I’ve read said that people spend way less than I thought was possible on food. Between $5-8 a day. Is the low cost because you just eat Ramen all the time? I can’t imagine spending less than $15 a day just in food. You have to get alot of protein due to the demand of 15miles/day average. Plus an enormous amount of carbs and fat. The only thing that I think would be easy and inexpensive is the fat - olive oil on everything.
Plus vitamins/minerals/etc.
Am I missing something, or is the $5-8/day average for just women, or what?

I’m 6 foot 6 inches, and need alot of calories, but I’m sure the rest of you do to on trail too, due to the high physical demands of hiking.

Steve

Steve

#2

I read over my original post, and realized that I didn’t really ask questions.
Do you guys eat monotonous foods between towns, and then get more protein,etc. in towns?

And please don’t answer" You only need 50 grams of protein a day, and you can get that from oatmeal,or some such nonsense", especially for a hiker travelling 15/miles day.
Steve.

Steve

#3

Does food get monotonous? It can. But it doesn’t need to get monotonous if you are a little creative. For example, don’t rely just on ramen noodles. Mix it up with Mac & cheese, Lipton, and some freeze dried meals like Mountain House. Liptons come in both rice and noodles. And several flavors of each.

Protein? Just add a foil package of tuna, chicken, salmon, and the like. Or rely on peanut butter and nuts. Peanut butter has a hike calorie per ounce ratio. Great for lunches. Nuts are great for snacking.

How much of this stuff are you going to buy at a grocery store? $15 per day will buy a lot of liptons and other backpacking foods.

Peaks

#4

I don’t know where you got the $15 per day figure, but it seems very high. We spent less than $8 per day per person on our ADT hike. And we didn’t hesitate to stop at restaurants, fast food places, and coke machines along the way.

Our final figures were groceries ($2309) and dining ($4926)for a total of $7235 for both os us.

Hikers who think that they will get tired of meals tend to shop as they hike, that is buy groceries at town stops along the way. Other hikers want to know that they will have meals they like and ship themselves food.

We usually mail food becasue we can be a bit picky about our meals. We don’t want a steady diet of Lipton and Ramen, and we avoid freeze dried foods. I ate too many freeze dried meals on Boy Scout trips. We found we can eat well off grocery store foods and by stripping all the packaging the weight is pretty reasonable as well.

Ken

#5

Steve,

Food costs depend on what you want to eat, and how much effort you are willing to put in ahead of time, or when resupplying. The choice is up to you entirely, and what works for other people may not make you happy.

The easiest and most expensive food choice is to buy pre-packaged freeze-dried foods at a backpacking store. Breakfast and dinner and various side dishes would probably run $15-20 a day. Add lunch and snacks on top of that.

Fairly easy and much less expensive is to buy regular grocery-store food that can be cooked on a camp stove. Lipton’s Noodles and Sauce dinners are popular, along with Mac and Cheese, various couscous dishes, Rice and Sauce, etc. These will run about $1 each, and you’ll need one or two per person depending on how hungry you are. To add protein, find one of the new bags of cooked chicken, tuna, shrimp, crabmeat, etc., and toss it in. To add some flavor and fiber, get a container of ‘Just Veggies’ and put a handful in each meal. That’s dinner. (Sample meal: Lipton’s Alfredo Noodles and Sauce, handful of Just Peas, and package of cooked bacon – makes pasta carbonara. Yum.)

Breakfast is granola, dried milk, and dried fruit in a ziploc freezer bag – you’ll need to put these together when you resupply at the grocery store. Easy to eat, cheap. Lunch is all manner of things: pb+j, cheese and crackers, dried sausage, hummous mix, energy bars, a burger at a road crossing (always good ), etc. I can easily eat this way for less than $8 a day per person.

Somewhat harder but less expensive still is making your own ‘instant’ meals at home ahead of time, then mailing them to yourself. You can save money buying ingredients in bulk, and you can customize each meal. I like to make ziploc bag dinners into which I can pour some boiling water, wait 5-10 minutes, and eat right from the bag. I make my own granola, put in home-dried strawberries and powdered milk, and that’s a satisfying breakfast every day. With some care, I can keep my per day costs to $4-5 per person. There are two major disadvantages to this method – first, mailing costs can eliminate any savings, and second, your tastes (and appetite) can change over a long hike. I remember after just two weeks not ever wanting to see another Curried CousCous Dinner.

I get a lot of my calories and protein from my snacks during the day.

Happy trails,

Big Cranky

cranky

#6

You will find your apetite changes dramitcally on the trail so I would avoid the freeze drying your own food route. I persoanlly ate alot of Ramen, Liptons, peanut butter, and cheese. My favorite meal was mashed potatos w/one of those foiled packs of chicken. All of these items are real cheap (except the packaged chicken) but you’ll want to mix it up with a few luxury items along the way. I think in the end I probably spent about 6-8 dolars a day , not counting binges in trail towns.

I really enjoeyed hiking up north when the trail crossed a couple of delis and stores where you could eat one sandwhich and buy another for dinner later. Prices will generally increase as you head north.:cheers

Jalanjalan

#7

Pack weight. Pack weight and the weight of the food is a key factor in determining what you buy. To tell the truth, if I spent $15.00 a day for food my food bag would have weighed 30 pounds all by itself. Early on I was usually able to resupply for 4 days for around $25.00 and most of that was for the snack foods. Instant oatmeal, Lipton Sides, mac&Cheese and Ramen are that expensive.

Did it get monotonous? Sometimes. I guess I never really let it get to me. :slight_smile:

Cuppa Joe

#8

I made all my dinners for my 04 AT hike beforehand using various soup mixes and instant brown rice, couscous, soup macaroni or dehydrated potatos. I boosted the protein by adding textured vegetable (soy) protein (TVP) to each dinner packet. I’ve been eating the same types of dinners for more than 35 years of backpacking so I already know what I like. TVP is very light, is tasteless and absorbs the flavor of whatever you’re cooking, can just be added as you cook whatever you choose to eat and is cheap bought in bulk from a health food store. Buy the small granules, not the larger chunks - the chunks are obvious, granules just blend in. Another protein boost is to make instant pudding or Instant Breakfast with dry milk. A suggestion: reconstitute the milk first, then add the pudding or Instant Breakfast mix. There may be a few lumps but it tastes good.

The Walking Stomach

#9

Steve-

Since you posted on the AT forum, and mentioned protein specifically, this method works for the AT, or any trail with 3-5 day town stops.

Cheap proteien = hard boiled eggs.

Buy a dozen in town, eat a few for breakfast at the hostel, boil the rest, cool them and pack them out for consumption within the first couple days. Portable, quality protein. Cooked eggs last a couple of days, and coupled with a bagel offer alot of usefuyl energy and bodily repair/building blocks.

I often alternated that with cheese, or pouched tuna/salmon/chicken for variety, or added TVP or powdered whole milk (Nido) to my meals.

Olive oil in a squirt bottle adds needed calories - add to all cooked pot meals. Cheap, and good for the heart too.

Crumbled bacon - a bit pricey and not so good for the heart (but then, you’re exercising hard). But salty and oh so good to perk up any pot meal! A litle goes a long way.

Candy and nuts in bulk.

Gawd, I’m starting to jones for red beans and rice in a pot!

Jan LiteShoe

#10

Steve, I ate massive quanities of food!! Flame and I together probably averaged about $5 to $8 a day. My motto on the trail was “I hate to eat on an empty stomach!”

Ditto to what others have said.

Like the Walking Stomach, we added TVP to just about every evening meal (Model T recommended it to us). It is very light and doesn’t impart a different taste to your meal. We mixed “grocery picking” in towns with maildrops. We bought our TVP in bulk and had it in our maildrop. We also added bouillon to some of our meals to improve the taste. We always had dried milk to add to our meals with cheese. We were very conscience of our protein intake. It probably had something to do with our age (we carried our AARP cards with us!).

Like Jan, we carried olive oil. We always had hard cheese. If we stayed over nightnight in town and could get to a stove, we boiled a dozen eggs.

I would suggest you read some of the older hikers journals, that’s what we did before our thru hike and it really made a difference in our food prep. It appeared to me that most of the older hikers we saw ate better than the younger hikers.

Good luck and have a great hike!

Papa Smurf

#11

I can’t stand trail food anymore. The thought of Lipton’s turns my stomach.

I leave town right after an early lunch at a local restaurant and still try to walk 15 to 20 miles that day. I carry out a packed dinner consisting of either several hamburgers, pizza, hoagies, or something along those lines.

That leaves the next day and sometimes another day before I get to the next town.

I usually try to carry two Little Debbie fruit pies (about 400 calories each) and have those for breakfast along with a fresh brewed cup of Starbuck’s each day. They weigh 4 ounces each, that’s 8 ounces each day, but I wake up dreaming of having pie and coffee for breakfast. :-)))

I usually “graze” every hour while I’m walking the day on prepackaged bars, one Midnight Milky Way (I don’t even like Snicker’s anymore), some gorp, or any other junk food I find at the last town I was in.

My favorite dinner on the trail is a couple peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on fresh…gotta be fresh bread.

The first day out of town, I usually eat “town food”, then “trail food” the next day. I try to walk into the next town by noon the following day and head right to a restaurant. If I get there soon enough, I can order breakfast first, then order lunch and leave the restaurant feeling satisfied…at least until early dinner at another restaurant, followed by a bunch of deserts later if I’m staying in town at a motel. I’ll have ice cream, potato chips, or anything that looked good when I resupplied for the next stretch of trail between towns. :-)))

I start the next day with a sit down breakfast at a local restaurant, then right after checking out of the motel at about 11am, I go eat a sit down lunch at a local restaurant before packing out another good dinner for that night…starting the routine all over again.

If I don’t stay in town at a motel that night, I still try to get in around noon or earlier and eat ALOT of food before walking out of town early afternoon with hamburgers or pizza for that night. :-)))

That works for me…I HATE TRAIL FOOD!!!

Hey Papa Smurf, You wrote;

“Like Jan, we carried olive oil. We always had hard cheese. If we stayed over nightnight in town and could get to a stove, we boiled a dozen eggs.”

Well, Liteshoe copied you too…she carried her AARP card. :slight_smile:

Stumpknocker

#12

I ate only snickers for a month. Don’t do that. We ate the following (every day): b-fast–we’d pack out cheese danishes or some high cal pastry. lunch–1/4 block of cheese & tortillas or pita. dinner–1 lipton dinner or mac&cheese, etc. snacks: little debbie all day. I weighed 115-ish and ate about 5+ snacks/day. Double that for you, maybe. I loved trail food, b/c I was so hungry & it tasted great at the time. DON’T get trail mix or rabbit food. That stuff makes me sick to even think about it. Candy bars are 1/4 of the price & just as many calories as protein bars & yummy.

CuppaJoe: R.S.Danger & I are hiking Georgia next week! Ha ha ha–she couldn’t get enough of hiking!

Shera, Princess of Power

#13

If your gear weight is fairly lite, another good trail food is military MRE’s. Personally I liked the old C-rations better, but the MRE’s are not too bad. They have all the condiments and even there own heater to heat them. If you don’t have a heater, there easily heated by laying them on a rock in the sun, or even carrying them under you arm! Excellent mix of calories, protein and fat. They can be bought for $38 for a case of 12. That coupled with junk food snacks, raw nuts and dried fruit one should be able to eat fairly good on the trail.

JTtheWolf