Eating on the trail

This is probably one of the first questions people ask when they find out we're planning to backpack for 6 months straight.  The most common answer is eat a lot of ramen, oatmeal and poptarts.  Little Debbies are very popular as well :-)  I'm a bit of a research junkie so I've spent the last 5 years reading just about everything I could about how to hike the trail and how to plan to hike the trail.  However, since the main motto of the trail is "Hike your own hike" everyone you ask or read has a different view.  When it comes to food the biggest choice to make is whether to do maildrops, resupply along the way or some combination.

I would say in general most thru-hikers will tell you not to do a lot of maildrops because you lose flexibility.  If you're doing maildrops, even doing only locations within a mile of the trail you confine yourself to a schedule and potentially end up racing to make it into town to make it before the post office closes or waiting until the post office opens on Monday.  This can be a fairly big drawback.  We have decided however to do the majority of our food via maildrops and here's why: nutrition.  When talking to people we've discovered that most people aren't putting much thought into the nutrition of the food.  Also if they do maildrops they're mailing things like poptarts, oatmeal, raman, etc, which is essentially what you can buy along the way.  Hence maildrops end up being more of a PITA than helpful.  We're hoping that by doing maildrops with a more nutrionally thought out menu we can enjoy the hike more despite the loss of flexibility.

For the past 7 months we've been (mostly) on what's called the Zone diet which is mainly about always eating protein, carbs and fats in proportion and together.  So our plan is to try and use the same nutrional principles to prepare dehydrated meals.  We've noticed such a huge difference in energy levels while on the Zone that we figured it should work (with some tweaking) to help us hike all day everyday. 

Since we were smart enought to register for a food dehydrator for our wedding (in 2005!) we are now in the process of testing out meals and then dehydrating large batches of food.  Last November we attending the Gathering which is an annual meeting/conference of the ALDHA and Matt attended some seminars on food for backpacking.  One of the seminars was run by a lady named Mary Holmes who printed and sold a booklet about backpacking food that is based on the Zone diet.  I love it when someone does the hard work for me!  And yes, Matt attended the seminar, because in our house Matt does all the cooking (he kicks me out of the kitchen) and hence is in charge of food for the trail :-)  Between her booklet and the book The Dehydrator Bible we sat down and chose 10 dinner recipies.  Today I started dehydrating small amounts of the ingredients for 4 of the recipies so we can test cook them.  We'll let you know how they are.

Since this post has become unreasonably long I'll write more on this subject later!