What does the thru hiker eat on the average day on the trail?

[OneStepCloser]

breakfast, lunch, snacks and dinner.. give me examples of all for a typical day. how much food to carry what foods to carry? i "downgraded" if you will for a super light stove, it burns less but its next to nothing in weight and still works great. the miniatomic 2 from minibull. i used to have an msr but i was cutting down on weight... thus far i have come to know oatmeal, ramen noodles, mac n cheese, powdered milk for oatmeal, and cheese... im planning for a thru hike next year and food is like the main worry i have.. because i get super hungry and have a fast matabolism. i also am not sure how much food to actually carry. I figure if i start 8 miles from Springer then hike to Neels gap to resupply ill have a better idea of how much food to carry.. there just isnt really any hiking around here where i can test out my food supplys for extended trips.

[Joey C]

Some of this is learn as you go, especially as you can't get the same stuff at each resupply point. I start off with oatmeal, granola bar, GORP, Snicker, mac-n-cheese, and beef jerky for a one day food supply. Sometimes, a lot of times actually, I end up with more snicker's after the first resupply, and less GORP. GORP gets old to me real fast. Couscous gets added to break up the pasta routine, as does Pasta-roni meals when I can find them. It never seems enough, but I don't want my pack to be too heavy. So I'm usually very hungry after 3 days on the trail, but enjoy the build up to and enjoyment of town food oh so much more than I do from every day life.

[Papa D]

Ok - this is straight up Thru-Hiker - not section hiker or even "long section hiker" - when I thru hiked it was a bit different, but I do support for several and hike with them quite a bit:

Breakfasts: 2 poptarts (carry a "block") protein bar, instant oatmeal out of the bag with water and peanut butter mixed, protein shake from drop or store, cereal w/ powdered milk, coffee

Lunch: jerky (or seitan jerky), flatbread, , peanut butter, nutella, summer sausages, hard cheese, G.O.R.P. (peanuts, raisins, M&Ms), Clif Bars, Snickers, plus more breakfast stuff,

Snacks or 2nd lunch: junk from the last town: Snyders of Hanover Pretzels, Dorritos, Pringles, Snickers, Powdered Drink Mixes, Doughnuts, Honey Buns (after about a month, you eat more junk like this)

Dinnners:

Knorr Pasta Sides (pretty much a staple), Instant Potaotes with Cheese, Bags of Tuna Fish, Packs of Chicken, Mac n Cheese, Dried Tortellini, Ramen with peanut butter, soy sauce and hot sauce, anything left over from the buffet in town stuffed in a zip lock and if you went through a town, maybe a pizza folded up with a 6 pack of beer. Hot herbal tea also helps you to relax and sleep well - Thru-hikers (like marathon runners) sometimes have a hard time resting.

The idea is to look at the highest calorie food that tastes good and doesn't weigh too much but if you only use this philosophy, 2 poptarts wins out over a block of cheese but the cheese will sustain you longer so you sort of have to get a mix of foods that will give you calories, energy, and sustenance.

[Blissful]

I blogged on this - easier to give the link than repeat it.

http://blissfulhiking.blogspot.com/2...-of-stuff.html

[Tipi Walter]

Generally you eat what's available, unless you set up caches (who does this anymore?) or intricate food mail drops---but mail drops can get tricky as the food you thought you'd like before that trip becomes hated two months in. So, for me the best scenario is to let the resupply points dictate what you'll be eating for the trip. Eat anything and everything? Well, yes for some people, no for some people. It's probably wise to avoid the Junk---donuts, snickers, etc.

[Spools]

I like instant mashed potatoes, with concentrated pesto. or sprucing up ramen with jerky or pepperoni.

[Thrasher]

First day out of town you eat everything because it's too heavy and you have "too much." Then the last days you have "too little" and you have to portion everything out.
Normal day, eat 2 packs (4 pop tarts) breakfast. Throughout the day snickers/candy pepperoni's, cheese, trail mix, honey bun or two, peanuts, tortilla/bagel/bread, bananas, fruit if you packed any/ some nice day hiker gives you some. Dinner: mashed potatoes bacon bits with cheese, or rice with tuna or chicken or a box of macaroni with a meat, I had ramen like four times on the trail. Snickers bar afterward. Finally you're still hungry and go to bed.
If you go to walmart, it's food overload and you buy everything.

[Thrasher]

nutella

Forgot this! This is important at least 1 jar of peanut butter or nutella, sometimes both.

[Tinker]

The post title reminds me of a joke I heard years ago, probably inappropriate, but I'll supply the punch line:

Well, usually I start out with a couple of eggs, some bacon............

[Odd Man Out]

I was curious so I looked up the nutritional content of Pop Tarts, Peanut Butter, Cheddar Cheese and Nutella.
For 100 grams in your pack you get the following:

	PT	PB	CC	NT
Grams	100	100	100	100
Calories	438	588	406	533
fat grams	18	47	33	31
protein grams	64	21	1	57
carb grams	5	25	25	7

BTW, this is with frosted brown sugar cinnamon Pop Tarts, as this is what I grew up eating (comfort food!).
PB has the best balance and calories per gram. But all others seem to be good options.
Heck, just buy a pound of each for about 9000 calories of goodness.

[Thrasher]

The key is to put the nutella and peanut butter on the pop tart.

[leaftye]

I eat what I can get a lot of macronutrients from. It's that simple. You can get the "best" trail diet in the world, but it's absolutely worthless to you if you can't force yourself to eat enough of it. What you really need to do is check out different meals and try them out on a hiking trip before your thru hike.

[Odd Man Out]

The key is to put the nutella and peanut butter on the pop tart.

Actually that sounds really good. I have a question for those who pack Pop Tarts. How do you keep them from disintegrating into a bag of crumbs? Or do you just let them crumble?

[Papa D]

pop tarts are properly packed in the top of your food bag in zip locks -- they will resemble 2 "bricks" - 2 boxes of pop tarts with peanut butter and nutella will get you about a week - you will suck up the crumbs like a vacuum cleaner. Flatbreads, bagels, cheese are also important as a base layer along with the pasta, cheese, potatoes, etc. A thru hiker friend in '08 told me that (in towns) the holy caloric grail was a chocolate milkshake from Burger King.

[garlic08]

Here's my trail diet: http://www.trailjournals.com/entry.cfm?id=213108

I carry fig newtons rather than pop tarts. They're more expensive, but I like to tell myself they're healthier, and they do pack better. I buy poptarts if I can't get fig newtons.

Fats are higher caloric density than carbs, so I lean toward cheese and peanut butter and oily snacks like Wheat Thins and cashews. If you use the approximation that 1 oz of fat has 200 cal and 1 oz of carbs has 100 cal, a good achievable and consumable balance is between 130 and 140 cal/oz for your food bag, overall. My typical day is about two pounds of food, and about 4000 calories.

[Papa D]

+1 to Garlic's post - he's always so exacting - most just eat whatever looks good in the grocery store that will cram in a backpack and not spoil

[sbhikes]

I ate all kinds of things, but after a while I settled on just a few reliable things.

I found that not only did I hate all my mail drop food much of it was bad by the time I got it (stale or infested with moths.) So I shopped at stores along the way instead.

Some of my more reliable things included:
- Grape nuts with Nido powdered milk, walnuts or pecans, dried fruit
- Powdered hummus with olive oil and crackers
- Candy that didn't melt (reeses pieces, m&ms, gummy bears)
- Pepperidge Farm Chessman (my favorite, good with peanut butter on them)
- Peanut butter, sometimes just straight up
- Regular long-cook pasta (I liked orzo because it takes up less space in my pack) to which I would add a complete packet of Knorr Alfredo sauce and ample chunks of Swiss Grueyere cheese. Sometimes I added tuna or chicken from a pouch.
- Cous-cous with fresh broccoli, olive oil and curry seasoning was pretty good. Even better was to use packets of mayo instead of olive oil and add tuna, raisins and pecans.
- Instant pudding made with Nido.

Some odd things I ate due to the strange choices available in town:
- I brought a whole giant leaf of swiss chard. I love chard and it kept really well, surprisingly.
- Individually wrapped coffee pastries. Terrible without coffee.
- Gourmet baked goods (from the Stehekin bakery on the PCT.) Got stale way too fast. A disappointment.
- Real peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I put the jelly in the peanut butter jar (because the jelly jar was glass) and put the peanut butter in a baggie. The bread didn't get as squished as I thought it would. Oddly these made me more hungry after eating them than before.
- Mini-whole-wheat bagels and American cheese. These were quite satisfying but nothing is more disgusting than American cheese that has spoiled.

Some strangeness:
Oddly, I could not swallow flour tortillas or fig newtons. I would literally gag on them. This was a bummer because you can make a lot of good sandwiches with tortillas, but since I couldn't eat them, I found lunch to be quite a challenge. There were many foods I became completely frightened to eat for fear of choking out there in the wilderness all alone, including taffy-like subtances and gel energy blocks and things like that.

[cabbagehead]

- oat bars (nature valley is one type)
- fish packets
- GORP: mostly peanuts, a little bit of other stuff like banana chips and raisins
- protein bars
- cabbage every other day, sometimes skipping multiple days
- calcium / vitamin D pills
- multivitamin
- fish oil pills

[jdg]

like everyone has said, i find my taste change often and i am not picky so whatever is new is what i eat

[starr_child]

I am doing a 4 weeks section hike. I went to the sporting goods store and bought 2 weeks worth of Mountain House Foods dinner's. Looking at it I'm starting to regret it. Was I crazy to buy that much food. This will be my first time hiking this long. Please let me know. Thank you.

Kelli