Planning your Food, Shopping and Packing

Make a Food List

Decide how many ounces per day of dry food you will pack. This is the total weight of all food, not counting the packaging, and includes candy, snacks, everything. The number you pick is your magic food budget number. Resolve to stick to it.

Make a daily meal plan, and turn it into a shopping list by counting how many ounces of each type of food you want to carry.

Go Shopping

Take that list with you when you go shopping. You can keep a running total of your food weight while you shop by reading the packaging, and writing down the weight of the food as you put it in your shopping cart.

Lay the food out

Go back home and lay your food out for each day in separate piles. Make each day fit your weight budget. Look at your daily food. Is it balanced? Does it look healthy? Now is the time to make informed trade-offs and take more of one thing and less of something else.

Count out the fuel you need

Look at the meals you will cook. Count how much water you will need to boil every day. One fuel tablet will bring 20 oz of water to a boil. A large soup or stew for dinner will take one tablet. An 8 oz. hot beverage will take half a tablet. Count out the fuel you will need, and pack it up into a ziploc fuel bag with you lighter.

Pack up your food

We recommend packing your food in ziploc sandwich bags. They are very light weight, airtight, and you can see what is in them. They are the perfect ultralight backpacking food containers. In most cases you can save significant weight by repackaging the food you buy into zip-loc sandwich bags. You can write on the plastic bag with a felt pen if you want to label the contents, or give yourself cooking instructions.

We recommend grouping each day’s food into separate quart or gallon size zip-loc bags. This way you will observe how much food you eat every day. By packing this way, you develop a visual sense of how much food you eat a day. For most people this a new experience, and very insightful. Packing this way will also keep you from worrying about how much food you have left when you are halfway through your trip.

Pay attention to the weight of the food containers if you carry food in jars or bottles. Glass jars and metal cans are always a bad idea. When you are hiking, you should carry out all of your packaging and trash. Weighing your trash and empty food containers at the end of your trip will help sharpen your thinking about food packaging.

Read next about the two basic backpacking Meal Types.

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