The Omnivore's Dilemma

Most thru-hikers eat garbage. Take a moment to appreciate the irony. After careful selection of a particular pack or shelter, taking into consideration weight, features, materials, durability, cost--they go to the store to load up on Pop Tarts, Kraft macaroni and cheese, and as many candy bars as they can carry. Beyond doubt, many, many aspects of this trip will challenge the limits of my endurance, but in the kingdom of my mind neither cold, nor heat, nor mosquitoes, nor fatigue are as likely to damage my morale as the food.

Look, I get it: hunger is the best seasoning, and the cooking arrangements are limited. Boxed macaroni and cheese will never have tasted so good as it will after a long day on the trail; it won't be more than a few weeks before food equals fuel, full stop. But a staggering portion of the thru-hiker's shopping list leads me to aisles of the grocery store that I have never visited in my adult life. I've never cooked a Knorr packet of anything. After leaving Reed, food transitioned from a pleasant hobby to a driving force, and for the last five years I have made it my business to learn how to make all sorts of food from real ingredients, at work and at home, sometimes even collecting those ingredients myself. The kitchen is my laboratory. I've graduated to making jam, pickles, crackers, wine, cheese, bread, and candy bars from scratch. I make Pop Tarts from scratch. D'you hear? I MAKE POP TARTS FROM SCRATCH.

And having pampered my system on this kind of high-octane fuel, I am expected to start filling the tank with DIESEL.

For a while there, I flatly refused to think about it. I knew that if I got hung up on my adamant dismissal of gross processed food, I would never get this journey underway. Eventually it occurred to me that I could handily compare thru-hiking to the culture of a new and foreign country. I happen to know that there is no point hankering after crusty bread while you're living in Japan, there's no point pining for peanut butter when you're living in Spain, and there's no point wishing for fresh milk in Antarctica. It doesn't help. It just fosters discontent. But everywhere I've been, I've found at least one uniquely delicious thing that I never encounter anywhere else, so there IS a trade-off. Life Lesson #700: Eat the food before you with the understanding that you will not have to eat it forever, find out what it is that that culture does best, enjoy it vicariously--and move on.

With that in mind, I will demolish my share of Snickers (and Pay Day, and Almond Joy, and every other shitty candy bar that I'd normally replicate at home, plus mountains of chocolate), but that doesn't mean I have to buy into the befuddled all-Snickers-all-the-time mentality shared by many, because this is my hike. I can do better than that. For what it's worth, one of Boomer's cautionary tales from his first year had to do with food. He lived on garbage, lost too much weight, and with nothing left in reserve, his emotional state followed a predictable but terrifying roller coaster directly related to his caloric intake. He'd trip over a tree root and feel like he simply could not go on, the trail had defeated him. Then he'd go to town, wolf down a pizza and a quart of ice cream, and feel like he could conquer the world, what was all the fuss about? He had to take a week off in northern California to eat and restore a little stability. Generalization alert--I think that for various culturally-instilled reasons, first-world women spend more of their formative years growing accustomed to being hungry than first-world men, so the light-headed empty-belly feeling doesn't scare me for a day or a week--but there comes a point, with thru-hiking's daily exertion, when the sensation of hunger can't keep pace with the body's needs, and a Snickers bar is not enough to stave off the crash. Good food means a good mood, as well as a healthy body. I want to enjoy my hike, not just survive it.

let's all go to the bar

Braaten's Pack Light, Eat Right offers some excellent advice. It didn't tell me a great deal about nutrition that I didn't already know, but it spells out the kind of adjustments necessary to fuel walking 20+ miles every day, and dispels some of the myths. How to avoid hitting the wall, and what to do if it happens. The importance of eating often--snack, snack, snack, all day--to maintain consistent energy levels. Drink a lot of water--a lot--how to tell when you aren't drinking enough, and what to do if you hit that [much scarier] wall. No-cook recipes. Clever hacks for ramping up calorie counts. With a little attention to what you're putting into your mouth you don't really need to take vitamins, and with all the processed trail-food you really don't need to take salt tablets, but she offers shortcuts for getting vitamin C and electrolytes, too.

What does a long-distance hiker want out of her food? Maximum energy for a minimum of weight, bulk, and spoilage. In practice, this means dehydrated food--water is monstrously heavy and available on the trail, to be added as needed--and a lot of fat. Mmm, faaaaat. Ideally, you could just travel with a bucket of clarified butter! But that would summon every bear within a hundred miles, and I couldn't drink butter straight anyway. It's reassuring to see a few familiar foods get top billing: nuts and peanut butter, Nutella, chocolate, olive oil. After that, cereal bars, powdered milk, granola, trail mix, dried fruit, cookies, and candy. Tortillas and pita are the way-breads of choice, because they pack down so easily, but crackers are good, too. Cheese, hummus, foil-pack meats, like tuna and chicken, and jerky if you can stand it, help to round out the proteins. Drink mixes. (Carnation Instant Breakfast + instant coffee = Hiker Mocha.) So far so good. I'll miss toast and eggs, but all of this beats the hell out of pemmican and Special Cabin Biscuits.

"After six months of eating the same stuff, my favorite food items during this trip were anything that contained chocolate. My least favorite items were anything that didn’t contain chocolate. Next time I go on a long trip, I’m only bringing chocolate, at least for breakfast, snacks, and dessert."
-Andrew Skurka, upon finishing his 4700+ mile Alaska-Yukon expedition

"taste adventure" instant soups

Dinner-time will pose the biggest challenge, because after coasting through the day on something remarkably similar to (if less "instant" than) the above-listed diet, I normally settle down with a vegetable "salad" as big as my head. Summer and winter, cooked or raw, this is what I eat the most, and there are bajillions of delicious seasonal permutations. Vegetables aren't much of a feature of trail life, as you can imagine, and I can already tell that this is where I'm going to hit a wall. Thru-hikers turn to a hefty carbohydrate supper, because it's easy, filling, and provides fuel the following day. Noodles, instant mashed potatoes, instant rice, oatmeal, couscous, instant soup--you get the idea. Extra calories (and flavor) appear in the form of dried cheese sauce, dried alfredo sauce, dried pesto, olive oil, Butter Buds (what the fuck are Butter Buds?), meat, maybe dehydrated vegetables. I am so out to sea on this one, it isn't even funny. They're all SO SALTY. Salt is magic, don't get me wrong, but it's just too much. During trial-runs for Top Ramen, Taste Adventure soup, and even organic quick-cook quinoa, the inside of my mouth felt cured before I'd finished half a portion. I'm still trying to sort it out, this dilemma, and I guess I'll just have to learn as I go.

I only have five food maildrops to fill at the start, thank heavens, so in the absence of any proven trail-food theory I decided to load them up with as much shelf-stable homestyle hippie chow that I can muster: all those idiotically expensive food bars from the co-op; almond and sunflower seed butters; good chocolate; salmon; homemade granola and trail mixes; anything at all from Trader Joe's. I also ordered a bunch of packaged meals from Outdoor Herbivore, a little company out of North Carolina specializing in vegetarian hiking food, whose good-earth practices will hopefully equate to less salt, more flavor. The selections have twee-sounding trail names like "Switchback Soup & Stuffer" and "Sunrise Breakfast Scramble" and "Lickety Split Lentils"; and "Coconut Chia Peel," which could be either a meal or a facial treatment. If I like them, I might order some more and have them delivered to Ashland.

outdoor herbivore meals & sprouting bag

But most exciting to me: SPROUTS. Yes, you heard right. The desert will be too dry, and the Sierras too bear-ridden, but starting at Echo Lake I will carry a sprouting bag and seeds, and grow my own greens on-trail. Paul sent me the link to Outdoor Herbivore's sprouting kit as a joke, but it felt like a message from the heavens. Sprouts? SPROUTS! THAT'S IT! That's the answer! So simple! So genius! Just rinse the seeds a few times a day, and you've got vegetables in less than a week! Radish and alfalfa and broccoli and lentil and mung bean and...! I WILL HAVE GREEN FOOD! I knew there had to be a way! I will look forward to those sprouts from the day I set foot on the trail to the day I open that box. If a tortilla wrap with tuna and crunchy sprouts sounds good now, a thousand miles later it's going to taste AMAZING. Sprouts! I am SAVED! I can hike the PCT!

Oh, and how much food? For a woman of my size, reckoning on two pounds of this kind of dry, high-calorie food per day ought to be more than adequate. Two pounds of fatty food every day. About four thousand calories. Every day. Plus milkshakes, onion rings, sushi, and monster salads on town days. I've never eaten that much in my life. If I can keep the caliber of my food on par with my lofty expectations, I think I'm really going to enjoy being a bottomless pit.