Menu Planning for a Backpacking Trip

Menu planning is hard.  Add to that the stress of planning a menu for a trip out in the wilderness (with limited water, fuel, and ability to carry all the ingredients) and you’ve suddenly multiplied that stress.

This is what we’ve had to do for our backpacking trip that my sister, David, and I are taking.  We are really looking forward to the trip, but we are backpacking novices, and I want to make sure this trip runs as smoothly as it can!

My own inefficient use of a backpacking stove.

On the Food Industry and Green Beans

We’ve been getting weekly bags of produce from a local farmer and friend this summer, our second summer in a row participating in Community Supported Agriculture.  CSA’s, as they are usually called, are one spoke in the massive wheel that is the recent alternative food movement.  As Warren Belasco points out well in his book Appetite for Change, alternative food movements are no recent phenomenon (um, communes of the 1970’s anyone?).  It’s important to remember this – that we are not newly discovering that our food system is broken.  Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle was published 105 years ago, though the concern over food production goes even further back.  There is a reason that drinks such as beer, wine, and tea are so popular throughout the world: safe drinking water has never been easy to come by, and these are all methods of making water potable.