Logistics: Food

All of this will weigh between 8 and 9 pounds.  That is close to 5% of our total gear weight including the bikes.  Quite a bit of weight, but also quite minimalist when you consider how we eat.  At home we often spend an entire evening each week just prepping vegetables and making base stocks and sides such as rice and lentils so we do not fill all of our evenings with cooking.  Our Vitamix is the most important piece of equipment in our kitchen and we will be a bit lost without it.

What we will actually eat

The number one goal is going to be making sure that we are getting all of the calories we need through the healthiest diet possible given the obvious constraints.  At some point I might try to put up a recipe section on here as we come up with some quick, easy, and healthy meals that can be made on a single burner backpacking stove.  In the mean time, here is some information and a few lessons that I’ve learned over several years of bikepacking and touring

Treat your body like a truck, not a temple

Laird Hamilton said that.  His point was that you don’t want to be so concerned with what you eat that anything out of the ordinary causes IBS.  The reality is that we will need close to 6,000 calories just to break even on some days.  If you’re wondering, that is about 11 Big Macs.  I am typically more in the camp of people who are very conscious of what I eat (sans the occasional cookie or ice cream treat).  At the same time, I like to think that if 90% of what I eat is fresh fruits, veggies, and quality grains then the other 10% is fair game.

My general rule is that I do not buy anything unhealthy to have at home.  However, on my first tour around Michigan I was finding it difficult to get the calories I needed and by the end found myself getting Burger King for the first time in who knows how many years.  I was trying to put up 150 miles that day.  I remember stopping and getting a burger, fries, and a large Coke (Note that I almost never drink soda and am very sensitive to caffeine).  When your body is taking in that many calories, you can literally feel your muscles absorbing the nutrients.  It is how I imagine Mario felt when he ate the mushroom to power up.  I ate everything in about 5 minutes and was immediately back on the bike.

Stopping to eat during the day isn’t much different than stopping for gasoline at this point.  You run into a shop, you buy some fuel, you put it in the tank, and you get back on the road.  When you start looking at what you eat as fuel for your body and taking note how some fuels work better than others, your perspective on eating changes.

What would a logistics post be without at least two spreadsheets?

I am notorious for being the guy that doesn’t bring enough food on a backpacking trip.  I would rather be a little hungry than carry an extra energy bar.  One year a friend and I were planning a 200 mile trip on the Appalachian Trail and I knew I needed to be a little more prepared than usual.  I spent half a day researching various foods and their calories relative to weight.  The idea was to have the most energy dense food as possible to minimize how much we carried.  I used this to plan a daily diet of about 4,000 calories.  I remember how proud I was when we completed our first 5 day section and walked into town for a resupply just as I finished my last handful of trail mix.

Here you can see the caloric densities of many of the foods that we envision consuming regularly: