looking for food lists, broken down like gear lists

Hi JR, below is a link to the food and resupply spreadsheet I used on the JMT last summer. It’s a bit complicated, but worked well for my needs. Other than wishing for more jerky and less gorp, all the food and resupplies went well without a glitch.

http://www.lesmoorephoto.com/mountaineers/jmt-food-resupply-plan.xlsx

While mixing in different foods or carb/fat ratios may be better for a longer trip, the ratios, weights per day and most of the food choices were perfect for my needs on this two week trip.

Thanks Lester, this is helpful. So it looks like you basically only have one “meal” per day (dinner) and then graze on measured amounts of bars, nuts, jerky, sausage strips, kale chips and gorp for the rest of your intake, totaling around 1.25 lb/day, is that right?

Mike Clelland has some excellent articles on food planning which are available both on this site and in his book. Also check out Andrew Skurka’s site.

That’s right J R – we did one cooked meal per day, consisting of just boiling water, turning off the stove, and adding a blend of home dehydrated veggies in a base (rice noodles, couscous, etc) for 10 minutes. Some days we skipped cooking all together – we were both happy with it for this length trip. Luckily my partner and I were both in the category of folks who prefer hiking (and photography and swimming) to cooking. At home, cooking and cleaning dishes are chores – it’s feels freeing to keep backpacking chores and campsite tasks to a minimum.

JR – Any chance your are a Mac person and have Numbers? I have a detailed spreadsheet in .numbers format that calculates calories, protein and volume per day. I’m rather proud of it and was able to get 10 days @~3300 cal/day into a BV500 using it. I’ve exported it out as a .xlsx file before but a Windows/Excel user said it didn’t work for them.

I’m not at my computer right now but I have some spreadsheets from the JMT Yahoo group that are full of useful, specific information.

I will post a bunch of useful files here later tonight.

Thanks David, I’ll check out Clelland’s and Skurka’s sites.

Appreciate the insights, Lester.

Matthew, I am Windows not Mac. If you post it as .xls or .xlsx I’ll see if I can open it, thank you.

I’ve struggled with this as well, but I am not sure how helpful other people’s numbers would be.  Everyone needs a different amount of calories.  What I’ve been trying to do is record the number of calories/weight I left with and record the number of calories/weight I come home with.  Then I can get an accurate picture of what I need for a particular trip or look at it over a number of trips to get a general idea and see how much I vary from them from trip to trip.

*edit: I should add, I tend to think of all the times I might want some snack to eat and add them to the stash, but I only eat that snack 25% of the time or less, so I end up carrying 4 times as much snacks as I need.  If I can consistently know how many calories I need I can stop adding food when I hit that mark…. that is the idea at least.

Here are the food resources I mentioned.

Matthew_JMT_Food_Calculator.xlsx is my masterwork. Creating this spreadsheet involved careful measurement of volume for each food in question. This spreadsheet reflects my desire to pack a lot of food into the fixed volume of a bear can. I found the spreadsheet to accurately predict how much food would fit in the can.

Instructions

1. Copy the master sheet for as many days as you plan to be out
2. Sort by Caloric Density Factor (calories ÷ volume)
3. Pick food items from the top of the list!
4. Enter the desired number of servings for the day
5. Note calories, protein, weight and volume per day

Notes

• All food items were gently crushed to increase packing density.
• Foods were packed loosely in bulk. I rehydrate in an HDPE jar which remains in my bear can at night. I found that freezerbags wasted a lot of space and weight.
• Extra space in can was filled up with a bag of FD veggies that I mixed into couscous, polenta or beans. Calories, weight, volume were not calculated on the spreadsheet. I just took as much as I could fit into the can and put them into my dinner for a little fiber, flavor and nutrition.

See below for what I use.  I typically only bring about 50 of the same items that I enjoy on trips. The list on the left is the standard list of food items with cal and oz listed,  The Daily Item List gives me a visual of foods items that I’m bringing and allows me to check that I’m staying diversified throughout the trip. This portion of the spreadsheed updates automatically based on what I select in the Day x portion of the spreadsheet. The Day X lists allows me to select what items I’m bringing for that particular day.  Items I’ve selected automatically  become green cells, items not selected automatically become red cells. Once I’ve selected the items the spreadsheet shows the calories and weights for that item and summaries the total for the day.  The Trip summary gives be a day by day summary and ave/day of the weight and calories.

PM me for the list with a direct email address or let me know how to post the spreadsheet into a forum post.

In case one doesn’t have a magnifying glass.

Here’s one of mine, from a trip a while back. I packed for 9 days, but got H1N1 and hiked out in 7 with LOADS of food left over. Didn’t eat much of anything for 2 days.

That said, I no longer use this method. I only ever did it twice. It was worth it for the learning exercise, but now I go by total weight on my kitchen scale, no spreadsheet needed. I start by packing dinners and everything else I know for sure I’ll be bringing, then add snacks until I reach my target.

My targets are much higher than 1.25lbs/day. In the summer, I’ll do 1.5lbs for the first week, 1.75 for the second and 2 after that. The longest hike I’ve done was 20 days split over 3 sections and those were the weights used. Hiked out with a handful of nuts each time.

In the winter, I’ll add at least 0.25 lbs/day on top of that. But regardless, the important thing is to try different weights out until you figure out what works for you. I started at 2 lbs/day and worked my way down from there.

I’m one of those skinny guys who eats constantly, so it makes sense that I need more food than others. I’ve actually been waiting patiently for my metabolism to slow down with age, so that I can maybe take less food backpacking. I hear enough people complain about it happening that I figure it’s worth a shot. In the past year or so it seems like it’s finally there, because I eat something like 1000 fewer calories per day when at rest, and that seems to translate into my weights.

Thanks everyone, looping back on this thread…

These in fact are more detailed than I have been attempting, specifically in terms of tracking calories. I’ve been figuring that as long as I’m bringing typical meals and snacks of typical volume and weight per day then calories should more or less work themselves out. Similar to what Nick describes.

This exercise has made me re-think my whole spreadsheet strategy and what I should be tracking. But ultimately I may stick to just planning based on volume/weight, and in particular the various spreadsheet you folks have kindly provided can serve as benchmarks to help keep accuracy in my approach of using weight and volume of the right kinds of stuff as a proxy for calories.

Ben, your deductive approach makes sense, but one of the things I have struggled with is just how much for each meal I should bring. If I prepare a FBC meal and don’t eat it all, depending where I am I may not pack out the rehydrated food and thus can’t measure it at the end. But generally it’s a pretty foolproof way to back into the right numbers.

Matthew, the zip file and then your spreadsheet in it opened for me no problem. Lots of great info in here, thanks. I take a similar approach with my gear spreadsheet of having a “master” that lists all my equipment and then for a given trip I have a new tab in which I select items from the master.

Also like what Kenneth is doing, populating each day’s menu from a master list. Ken and Nick, I had to copy your images off and then could look at them larger, lots of great stuff here.

Thanks all!

Thanks to all who have contributed here, this is great info, just the sort of thing I am looking for. But we all have different tastes and are going want to pack different items. I’m a cook and I like to build my own meals from dehydrated or freeze dried elements, along with a few purchased freeze dried meals.

So here is what I am thinking. What if I create a Google sheet and post a sharing link so that all of us can add to it as we go. I like Mathew’s format, but would add columns for fat, total carbs, and sugars so those of us trying to go more Paleo can do so, by focusing on getting the extra calories from fat rather than sugars.

Anyway, first thing is do any of you mind if I steal your work to build into the shared spreadsheet? Please reply or send me a PM if any objection to that. As soon as I get it set up, I’ll post the sharing link and we can all build on it from there. Kenneth, I will PM you my email address, if you would be willing to share your data. I can work with Numbers or Excel. I don’t know if I will get as fancy as you have, but the great thing is we can all add on new calculator features as well as expanding the food list.

You are welcome to build on what I started. I’m glad you find it useful.