Why is a stove part of an “ultralight” system <3 days?

Brian, for a "no clean up" breakfast try using a snickers bar to alternately dip Nutella and peanut butter with like a spoon. Bite off little pieces of your snickers "spoon" as you dine. When you run out of snickers, lick your fingers and screw the lid back on the nutella and PB jars!
You wont even have a sticky spoon or ziplock to deal with.
As a side note, when the plastic jars near half full, transfer the remained into one of the jars (PB and Nutella mixed is superb!) then use the empty jar as a "garbage compactor". You will be amazed how many paper wrappers you can stuff into a nutella jar and still screw the lid on.

Matt,

Interesting idea to put the heat gain from drinking/eating hot liquid/meal into equivalent food calories (i thought it would be much larger…)

I guess the point youre making is regarding the supposed benefit of staying warm resulting from eating hot food (I didn't see anyone say that they could carry less food b/c the were heating their food).

Eating 30 Cals won't immediately provide you with 30Cal of thermal energy.
The semi-immediate heat is obtained from the "thermal effect of food" — the cost of digestion. I believe this is pretty low for general food (less than 10%).
The longer term heat from caloric intake is obtained by buring calories for heat (autonomic thermoregulation) or excercise (where heat output is a byproduct).
Resting thermalregulation is limited – maybe somewhere around 100watts or ~80Cal/hr (at least where any comfort level is maintained).
Heat obtained by excercising is very effective but who wants to exercise after hiking to help stay warm.

So I wouldn't say that argument is out. I am sure by drinking 500mL of hot tea I will be warmer (in the timescale of hours) than if I had eaten an equivalent amount of extra cold calories throughout the day (would be like increasing my resting metabolic rate by 50% or so for an hr).