Trail Food

Food is something we spend a lot of time thinking about. Hiking almost every day for a month makes you ravenous. Whenever we hit a grocery store, we buy all sorts of outrageous, heavy, spoilable things to consume immediately. Whole bags of potato chips, quarts of milk, and kilograms of kiwis have disappeared in a blink of an eye. And all without an ounce of guilt - both of us have lost weight on this trip, and need as many calories as we can get.




Plates of food, captured on film seconds before being devoured by ravenous hikers

Food out on the trail is quite a bit more limited than what we can eat in town though. It's been a bit of a challenge to find a somewhat varied diet that isn't too heavy, and fits our cooking strategy - dinner is our only hot meal, and cooking for that can only really consist of boiling water (simmering or extended boiling isn't really possible with our stove).

First a warning, this might get a little bit boring for non hikers. But hopefully future TA hikers can use this as a starting point for their own shopping and meal planning.

We had a decent repertoire of trail recipes in the US, but a lot of the things we were familiar with weren't available in the stores here. In the US, there are a lot more dry, instant/single serving foods than we've been able to find here. For example, there is instant rice here, but it is parboiled and packaged wet, which makes it very heavy and not worth carrying.

When you're carrying days of food at a time, the caloric density of your food matters a lot. We look for food that is, at a minimum, 100 calories per ounce. Not a typical nutritional metric, for sure. This means a 2000 calorie diet weighs about 1 lb, 4 oz per day, per person. 5 days of food for the two of us weighs 12.5 lbs. Considering that each of our packs weigh about 12 pounds before food and water, buying dense food really makes a big difference in our total carried weight. Also, 2000 calories isn't enough anymore. We probably eat closer to 3k per day now, and we're only getting hungrier.

This was all complicated here by unit conversions - we had to start measuring in kilojoules per 100 grams, which is how most packaging reports energy per weight here. Turns out that about 1600 kJ/100 grams is equivalent to 100 calories/oz.

So what have we been eating?

First, breakfast. Some people prefer to cook oatmeal for breakfast, but we find cooking in the morning takes way too long. So our main item is usually a couple of nut & cereal bars. Our favorites so far are the Tasty brand Meganuts bars - they're larger than average and pretty dense (2100 kJ/100 grams!) We've taken to dipping them in peanut butter for some extra calories.


megaNUTS. I doubt normal people could handle this much energy all at once

We also found "Complan" (we call it "complain") in one larger grocery store, which is the equivalent of Instant Breakfast from the US - a powder that you add to cold water with lots of calories and nutrients. It's on the expensive side though, and is rarely stocked.


They might want to rethink their product name and/or font choice

Despite my protests that it would be gross, Liz recently bought a packet of powdered yogurt, which you are supposed to make in a yogurt maker machine, and made a breakfast shake out of it by just adding water. It actually turned out to be quite good, is much cheaper than Complan, comes in more flavors, and is available everywhere. As a bonus, it has protein, which is something we don't get enough of. Some mornings, when we need a little extra motivation to start walking, we add some instant coffee to the mix, which makes a surprisingly good, creamy iced coffee shake.

In the future we will probably also buy some powdered milk and muesli, but we haven't tried that yet.

For lunch, we have two main options - first is pepperoni, cheese, and crackers. We've found two favorite cracker types - Meal Mates and Cheds. For cheese, we get the hardest, most aged cheese we can find. Sometimes this is parmesan, but you can't find that everywhere, so usually it's a cheddar. The cheese tends to get a little soft and oily after a few days, but otherwise holds up very well if you keep it in a ziplock bag.


Meal Mates - it's a meal mate, mate!

Our other lunch is peanut butter plus jam, nutella, or honey (we carry one of the three at a time and rotate through for variety) on a tortilla. Tortillas and peanut butter are both a great source of calories.

One last lunch is a can of tuna on crackers or tortillas. We don't do this one as often because tuna only comes in cans here (in the US we normally buy the Starkist tuna in the foil pouches), and cans are heavy and a bit of a pain to deal with. At least the tuna cans tend to have pop tops, so they don't need a can opener. This lunch is a nice change of pace, so we usually buy it when we know we'll pass a trash can or are on a shorter section.

For dinner, we have a few options. There are many various flavors of ramen available everywhere here. 2 or 3 packets is usually enough for the 2 of us. We often add some Surprise brand dehydrated vegetables to make it slightly more interesting. These can be found in almost any grocery store and are a great way to get some lightweight "vegetables".


Surprise! There are vegetables in here!

Another dinner option is a couple of packets of prepackaged pasta sides (think alfredo noodles) with some cous cous added to soak up some of the sauce. These packets claim to need to be boiled for 8-10 minutes, but we've found that adding boiling water, insulating they pot in Liz's hat (bonus: Liz gets a warm hat), and waiting for 15 minutes works. We originally tried 3 packets with no cous cous, but both felt a little ill afterward, probably because of the massive amount of salt. The cous cous is a nice buffer, and adds some extra calories.

Our fanciest dinner is a coconut curry noodle dish. We combine powdered coconut milk (loads of calories! usually found in the international section, and available in a surprising number of places), Surprise brand dehydrated vegetables, curry paste, and egg or rice noodles. Add boiling water, stir, and you have a surprisingly good, spicy curry. With some extra water you can turn it into a curry soup for colder nights.


One packet of coconut powder and one curry paste packet will make enough for two nights for us

We also carry a plastic bottle full of olive oil, and add a tablespoon or two to most dinners for some extra calories. Olive oil, being pure fat, is the most weight efficient source of calories you can carry.

Then there are the snacks. We eat a lot of snacks. Two out of our five meals a day are snacks. A few of the highlights:

Chili lime soy crisps (they look like tiny churros, and are made from chickpea flour). These are amazing, but we can only find them in the scoop-your-own bins in Pak N' Saves, which are only found in larger towns. When we see them we stock up. There are not as many cheap, flavored crackers here as there are in the US (Cheez-its, we miss you!), so these are a great salty snack.


I classify these as goldfish food - if there were enough, I would probably keep eating them until I got sick

Tim tams! Amazing chocolate cookies, but a bit on the expensive side. We also enjoy the Budget brand chocolate mint slices, which are quite cheap, but can have a bit of a melting problem when the weather is warm. In general, there are plenty of chocolate cookie options everywhere.


Chit Chats - an on-sale knock off of Tim Tams

Trail mix of all kinds. We prefer mixes with fruit, nuts, and chocolate. We've also gotten into the habit of adding chocolate covered peanuts to whatever trail mix we find. Most bigger supermarkets have a good selection, with Pak N' Save again being the best. In Four Squares (smaller grocery stores, common in smaller towns), we've made our own with a big bag of raisins, chocolate bits, and peanuts.

Dried apricots or prunes are a bit heavy, but Liz loves to carry them in her hip belt pockets as a quick energy boost while walking.

Candy bars. Nuff said. Snickers are our favorite but tend to be fairly expensive here, so we buy whatever is on sale.

Potato chips usually also show up for a day just after towns, but they don't last long due to both their fragility and tastiness.


As we've already established, hiking long distances makes Liz a little... weird sometimes

Our last, best secret is drink mix. Drinking only water, all day, every day, gets very boring, and the drink mixes liven things up immensely. We brought hundreds of tiny drink mix packets with us from the US. We replenish our supply every time we get our bounce box. We can't find these anywhere over here - all the drink mixes in the stores are big and bulky and have sugar added. Our drink mixes are tiny, have artificial sweeteners, and usually make about 3 cups from a packet (the directions usually say one or two cups, but we don't mind diluting them a bit). Whenever we hit a water source, we make a drink mix and chug it down. We also usually have one with dinner, unless we're dry camping. We have a mix of brands & flavors - Crystal Lite, Propel, and Ocean Spray. You can buy them in bulk from Amazon. Try them, you'll never hike without them again!


DRINK MIX

We also take a multivitamin every day to try to fill in the minor nutritional gaps left by ramen and potato chips. The main things we miss, and try to fill up on in towns, are meat (protein) and fresh fruits and vegetables (fiber, other good things).

Hopefully that helps other people get an idea of what kinds of lightweight trail foods you can easily find here. If you have any questions about other things that are/aren't available, don't hesitate to ask, and if you have your own NZ trail recipes, leave them in the comments!