I’m prepping for a trip this weekend. Last night I experimented with cooking quinoa and then dehydrating it. Works great. Rehydrates with just water and only takes 5 minutes from adding boiling water to ready-to-eat. I don’t think there should be storage issues.

- Quinoa + powdered coconut milk (or regular powdered milk) + dried berries + slivered almonds + cinnamon is really good. Nutty and crunchy. I’d imagine you could add honey to this if you wanted more sweetness or calories.

- Dehydrated cooked ground meat works well. It loses 50% of it’s weight when you dehydrate it. Leaner cuts work best. I’ve also had good results with well-browned ground venison.

- a friend of mine has gotten good results overcooking a broiler chicken in a stockpot (boiling it) until the meat was ready to fall of the bone. Then he stripped, cubed, or shredded all the meat off by hand and dehydrated it. This gives you complete control of the meat quality (who knows what’s in canned stuff) and makes a killer chicken broth to boot. I’ll do this in the future. I’ve heard of folks using rabbit in the same way, but I haven’t seen it done so can’t vouch for that.

- Leave behind the idea of having certain kinds of food for certain times of day. This opens up a lot more options.

- Powdered/dehydrated eggs + dehydrated ground beef/venison + coconut oil + dehydrated onions + garlic powder + hot sauce makes a great scramble for breakfast or dinner.

- If you’ve never tried pemmican do not underestimate it. I ignored it for a long time and now it’s a staple I never go on a trip without.

- Traditional dried Japanese miso soup is ready instantly and really hits the spot while you’re waiting for dinner. It ain’t primal but probably falls in the “neutral” food category. Better than the decidedly non-primal hot chocolate. Tea bags are a pain to pack out.

- Colder weather. Just add 4-8oz of butter to whatever you’re making. Naturally you’re going to have to carry more food when it’s colder but things keep much better, so you have more options.

- In general, fresh meats keep much much longer than we’ve been trained to believe. It’s worth noting that a lot of the “safe food handling” instructions we are accustomed to are in place because the CAFO meat we eat is raised and processed in such unsanitary conditions. If you know that the meat has been properly raised and slaughtered you’ve got more leeway with storage. Obviously, if it’s 90 degrees all bets are off. Be sensible, use all your senses to guide you, and cook the meat thoroughly (this isn’t the time for a rare steak).

Happy hiking

When it comes to backpacking, things have changed a lot in the last 5-10 years.

Until recently, most backpackers hauled 60-70 lbs loads for just a week in the woods. The pack to haul these loads weighed 8 or 9 pounds by itself. In the last decade most dedicated hikers have ditched these loads. It’s easy to see why. It’s miserable. Many now ascribe in varying degrees to the “backpacking light” ethos. In a nutshell, this calls for you to strip everything down to the bare essentials and carry only what you really need. Naturally, this means very different things to different folks. In general, baseweights (your pack and everything in it other than food and water) vary from 10 lbs at the ultralight end to 20-25 lbs at the heavy end – for a 6-7 day trip.

If you haven’t been backpacking in 10 years this may come as a shock, but modern materials and clever equipment designs have made it possible. The huge advantage of carrying less weight is that you can cover much greater distances (15+ miles per day over rough terrain) and can wear much lighter footwear (even 5 fingers). The reason I’m going into this is that someone who goes backpacking often enough to care about primal foods on the trail is almost certainly not carrying a 70 pound load and has very tight weight restrictions. The packs they use are probably rated for 30-45 lbs and exceeding that is an issue. In addition, someone who is leading trips into the backcountry (as the originator of the question indicated s/he does) often has to carry emergency/firstaid/communications “group gear” and is even more sensitive to weight for his/her personal food/gear.

If you’re just going for the weekend and can carry 3-5 lbs of food per person per day then you don’t need to make many primal compromises. Fresh meat day one. Fresh sausage day two. There are even light plastic containers to carry fresh eggs in. You probably won’t be using titanium cookware or a minimalist stove, so preparing these is easier. Fresh fruit and veggies will be in your weight range too, along with all the dried foods Mark noted. For those of you who mentioned canned goods, throw the item on a scale. You’ll discover that you could have brought a dry-aged steak instead (it’ll be fine for 2-3 days unless it gets really hot).

What to do if you are restricted to 1-1.5 lbs food/day/person
Primal eating essentially replaces carbs with fats as the main source of concentrated calories. Fats are harder to store and are much heavier. As a result you’re going to have to make some primal compromises to keep it light. But if you’re smart about them you don’t have to make many.

Caloric requirements: Forget about matching your calorie expenditure. On a typical weeklong trip, I’m probably burning 6,000+ calories a day. I find it hard to eat more than 4,000 calories even when not primal. You’re going to lean out a bit. Not an issue for most folks.

Primal Compromises:
Quinoa – Light and with lots of calories. Eat it with pretty much anything. If you buy the prewashed kind you can boil it and set the pot aside, while it continues to cook with the lid tightly closed. Toss some dehydrated veggies and chicken in there and they will all cook together while you get other camp chores taken care of. Practice this at home on your backpacking stove and make the necessary adjustments if you’re at altitude. Quinoa can be tricky, but once you get the hang of it it’s a great staple. I’ve found that different brands cook very differently, so find one, figure out the cook times on your particular stove and stick to that. I have a pot/stove cozy that’s very light (made by backpacker’s pantry, I think) that I use in the winter on backcountry ski trips to melt water quickly. Putting the cozy over the pot after you’ve brought the quinoa back to a boil means you can get away without running your stove at a simmer, which most backpacking stoves are terrible at.

Cheese – We can argue about whether some of us have the dairy genes or not and if dairy is primal for some of us or not. I take along hard cheeses and use them in any meal.

Rice – It seems to me that rice is the best of the worst. I only eat rice on longer trips when I’m sick of quinoa.

In addition to the pemican, jerky, powdered eggs, and nuts that Mark noted, here are a couple more foods I take along regularly:
- smoked salmon or trout (except in the height of summer)
- canned chicken that I’ve dehydrated at home
- lomo embuchado (spanish dry cured pork tenderloin)
- salami and similar hard sausages

The powdered coconut milk someone mentioned earlier works well. And I agree with Nicole that coconut oil is much easier to store than olive oil.

Meal timing
Primal folks are pretty comfortable with fasting, so the idea of skipping lunch is not a huge shock. I eat breakfast and dinner and then break twice during the day for a small nuts+dried meat+cheese snack. Not having to do the whole lunch production give you more time to explore.

Cost.
I haven’t really taken this into account. I am not on the trail long enough that things like smoked salmon break the bank.

Foraging – Really, this isn’t an option unless you get the timing just right or are moving very slowly. A lot of backcountry habitats, particularly at altitude, are very sensitive. Tramping around an alpine meadow picking blueberries may cause several years worth of damage.
Fishing, however, works great. There are very light fly or spinning setups out there. In the early morning and late evening when the fish are biting you’re usually at camp and you usually spend the night near a water source. Fresh trout for breakfast is fantastic. Just make sure to dispose of the guts properly as it’s a surefire bear problem.

Food storage/prep
- Food dehydrator: Really important if you want to eat real food while you’re out there.
- Vacuum sealing: Although it creates more trash to pack out, I vacuum seal smaller portions of certain foods (especially once that can leach oil like smoked fish). Helps pretty much all food last longer.

Backpacking in arid regions: This is tough and not something that I have any experience with so I’ll leave it to others.

Canned meat is quite easy to do and is stable for freaking long.

I’ve had one over 10 years problem free.

Asian shops carry a wide variety of dried seafoods. The packaged squid, cuttlefish and octopus are tasty but usually contain MSG.

I have a food dehydrator so I make jerky, pemmican, and a variety of dried fruits. (I get rather odd looks when I go to a local butcher shop and get 20 pounds of beef fat to make the beef tallow used in the pemmican.)