Walking and hiking

Expedition Foods

If you are going on a long walk you may want to carry food that has a lot of energy in it for its weight, then you need to carry less and your bag is lighter. The highest energy food you can get is pure lard but that is not very nice. You can also eat a candle, again not very nice.

I will ignore the silly foods for the rest of this. On a weeks walking you don't really need to be too concerned with vitamins and stuff if you eat a healthy diet either side of the expedition - that means you can eat what you like and not bother with broccoli or sprouts.

If you ever travel the world one of the factors indicating how expensive things are is the local cost of a Big Mac (this is true). The cheaper the Big Mac, the cheaper the country generally. I will use a similar method of comparing foods. A Big Mac has 953 Kjoules per 100g, or 229 kcals per 100g (2050 and 493 for a whole Big Mac). There are other foods that McD's make and here is the info (according to them)

There is such a variety of food you can buy or eat and I would be stupid to try to list them all. You can find this on the internet (Try this one).

I think that since there is a relative limited choice of breakfasts and chocolate bars I will find out what these contain with their energy. A good breakfast will set you up for the day. Note that there is good energy and not so good energy - look for food with lots of energy and lots of carbohydrates rather than sugars (quick energy) and fats.

Breakfast
Drinks
Snacks
60 minutes walking uses 1957 kjoules of energy. Living for a day needs an additional 1975 kjoules of energy. You need to eat this amount to stay alive on a walking expedition. Use 2000 kj per hour walking plus 2000 kj per day?

A note about food.
Sometimes you don't need to eat vegetables and things with your dinner. So long as you eat them normally, you can miss veggies for one or two meals.
I have gone on a tough light weight expedition where our food was basically dried pasta for dinner and mars bars for the rest of the time. My point here is that you should break the rules occasionally to make your expeditions bearable. I wouldn't go as far as just eating sugar for energy and nothing else but you get the idea.

Just as an aside here, I have been on an expedition and run marathons where as a snack I used energy gels. These are a very concentrated energy source and OK for very intense activity.