Philmont Food

While I completely understand the desire to carry less weight… the practice of stripping meals should only be left to an experienced crew. We witnessed an advisor for a VERY young crew strip all of their meals of 'unwanted' items. This was roughly day 3 for them. The youth had little say in what was stripped – a casual/flip question… "do you like this?". I question if by day 6 or 7 if the youth would not have eaten many of the stripped items… the caloric deficit that this advisor was creating was significant and hungry scouts will eat things on the trail that they may not eat at home.
Strip with caution and always have a backup plan.

As Walt mentioned there was plenty of food and gatoraid in the swap boxes. Our boys were an experienced crew that hiked over 90 miles on three shake down hikes prior to Philmont. They made their own decisions on what to keep. Typically, there was a lot of horse trading going on during this process. All in all, no one went hungry.