Packing Our Fears: Mailed Resupply Boxes

Mailed resupply boxes made me think of packing our fears like when our house burned to the ground in a wildfire in 2012. We thought we were doing well, under the circumstances. We evacuated with our critical documents, our computers, our dog, and some clothes.  A few months after the fire we had a lot of uncertainty, very few possessions, and mountains of food. I realized in my anxiety I had been stocking our pantry to survive the zombie apocalypse. Am I doing that again?

Now, packing our fears into the mailed resupply boxes is related to worry about an unpredictable food supply. As we have aged, our bodies have become petulantly insistent that we eat whole grains, vegetables, lean or plant-based protein, and lots of fiber. Whole foods are a great idea, but could we pull it off?

There is a lot of good, prepared trail foods but they are way out of our budget. Easily available traditional choices like ramen, instant mashed potatoes, and side meals are a challenge for older bodies with their high sodium and simple carbohydrate content. We knew we could dehydrate the kinds of food our bodies run best on but mailed resupply is hard.

How Much Do Our Fears Weigh?

As we look at the pile of food resupply boxes, I am overcome with anxiety that we have too much food. Will we be able to eat it all? Did we overspend on ingredients? There are shipping costs. Is it insane to mail it to the trail?

Photo Caption: ready to ship mailed resupply boxes with pink packing tape marked hold for AT hiker.

Each box is 41-46 pounds including food, toiletries, and first aid/repair resupplies. Our boxes are scheduled to be sent every two weeks. Our plan is to split each two-week box into three, carrying 5 days and bouncing 2 boxes of 5 days. I have done the math over and over. I have counted everything out in servings, balancing macros, fiber, and calories meticulously. Looking at all the boxes, I feel incompetent. At this point, my fears are all packed in the food, but I am afraid I cannot tell if it is too much or too little food.  

Each two-week box contains 40 pounds of food for three, 5-day segments for two people. Each resupply is 13 pounds or 6 ½ pounds per person, which works out to 1 1/3 pounds of food per person, per day. Between meals, snacks, and “add ons” the per-person daily caloric value is about 3000 calories, or 144 calories per ounce, well above the recommended 100-125 calories per ounce.

We can make it with what we have, but some peanut butter, cheese, tortillas, fresh vegetables, and oatmeal would be nice. Even with that, we will be below the typically recommended 1 ½ to 2 ½ pounds of food per person per day. It still feels like my fears.

Our Compulsion to Use Mail Resupply

Positive changes in our nutritional habits put us back on the trail, and we feel they are necessary to keep us on the trail. We have always been pretty good eaters, but during the years of heavy work travel and long nights care-giving, we let our nutritional guard down. Like a lot of people over 50, that rang the “uh-oh” blood sugar bell. My genes were less sturdy than The Historians, but neither of us had hbA1Cs to be proud of.

I stared down our treasured family practice physician and begged, “Give me three months.” She politely gave me her best, “I’ve heard that before” stare and granted me a temporary reprieve from a pack of medications. Change was swift, in the kitchen and the blood tests. After three months, we were both soundly in the normal hbA1C range. As icing on the cake, my gastroenterologist, following my last colonoscopy, complemented me saying my colon was “pristine.” I was giddy. Who would not want a pristine colon?

After three years of aggressively pursuing healthy foods and not eating out much, we literally have trouble sleeping and generally feel bad when we eat a “SAD” (Standard American) diet.

Eating Well, and Often: Macros, Fiber, and Daily Food Intake Distribution

Maybe we are not packing our fears in choosing whole foods. We look forward to some town food, but not too much. When we set out to plan our food, we had three years of daily exercise, sleep, and nutrition data to work from. With our health team, including our health coach and a nutritionist, we established our base caloric goal at 2500-3200 calories per day: 20 percent fat, 30 percent protein and 50 percent carbohydrates. We have a cap on protein, so we don’t over-stress our kidneys. If we need to exceed 3200 calories per day, we will increase complex carbohydrates and healthy fats. To support colon health and cat hole predictability, we are aiming for a high bar of 50-90 grams of fiber per day.

The driving force is maintaining a steady flow of fuel to our bodies. Our past hiking has shown us we, like others, can slip into dehydration or low blood sugar quickly. We learned that lesson the hard way after The Historian started wobbling precariously on a very narrow mountain trail with a steep drop-off. The last two miles to the car were painful for him and terrifying for me. Later, we figured out his instability was dehydration. Both of us can “bonk” from low blood sugar, but mine can drop to dangerously low levels even hours after a big hike.

We plan to eat well, and often. Our mailed resupply provides us with high-quality food we know our bodies will tolerate. I divided the walking day (rising to sleeping) into 6 parts and assigned 15-25% of our calories for each block. The macros are evenly spread out, except for a late afternoon snack that is high protein for muscle recovery when we stop hiking.

The Historian sleeps like a rock, so I doubt he will want any midnight snacks. I am not so blessed, but don’t plan to entice any bears to the tent by bringing snacks for the night.

Home Prepared, Whole Food Trail Meals

We drew heavily from The Backpacking Chef by Chef Glenn McAllister (1, 2) and The Hungry Spork series by Inga Aksamit.(3, 4) I don’t know if they would recognize any of their recipes exactly in our food boxes, but they were hugely inspirational. 

The biggest takeaway we got from the books was the idea of dehydrating batches of food and then assembling meals before putting them in the mailed resupply boxes. This immediately made sense to us as we have a long habit of canning and dehydrating during the summer months.

We lost count along the way, but my best guess is that we dehydrated over 1,000 pounds of food, including 600 or 700 pounds of fruits and vegetables.

Photo Caption: The stash of dehydrated beans, grains, proteins, and vegetables before being assembled into meals for the mailed resupply boxes

Categories of Foods Dehydrated for Mailed Resupply Boxes

Here is a list of the foods we assembled to create meals from. In most cases we were able to find or grow organic, additive-free and low or no sodium product.

• Whole grains (quinoa, white & brown rice, faro, bulgar, buckwheat, cornmeal, homemade “dressing bread” to make stuffing)
• High protein pastas (bean pasta, high-protein whole wheat pasta)
• Lean and Plant Protein (chicken breast, lean pork loin, cod, shrimp, soy plant chunks, textured vegetable protein)
• Beans (black, red, white, navy, pinto, mayocoba, split pea, lentils, chick peas, edamame)
• Vegetables (carrots, onions, celery, fennel, potatoes, winter & summer squash, tomatoes, bell peppers, hot peppers, okra, corn)
• Fruit (apples, persimmons, blueberries, strawberries, kiwi, bananas)
• Commercial powders (spinach, carrot, pomegranate, lemon, vinegar, yogurt, cream cheese, white cheddar)
• Salsa/Sauces (tomato salsa, marinara, roasted green tomatoes, organic low-sodium gravy packets)
• Herbs and spices (various individual herbs and spices, Spike, nutritional yeast)

Easy to Dehydrate Healthy Foods for Mailed Resupply Boxes

Throughout my life, we have eaten from the garden in the summer with enough to can for the winter. Even with that habit of projecting and preserving food months into the future, packing for mailed resupply was daunting.

We started last summer with garden food. After fresh vegetables, we graduated to dried beans. When I was on the trail in 1975, I ate a lot of lentils and split peas but even when I soaked them all day, it still took 10 to 20 minutes of fuel to cook them. I was pleased to discover cooked, dehydrated, beans are easy to prepare, lightweight, and re-hydrate with cold soak or light cooking in stews, humus, and mashed like re-fried beans.

Proteins & Grains

Shredded chicken breasts are perfect for tacos. In a pressure cooker, cover 4-6 chicken breasts with water and some seasoning (if desired). Cook at high pressure 25 minutes then let the pressure drop naturally. When cool, shred with two forks. Place on dehydrator trays at 165 degrees for 4 to 5 hours and boom! Dinner. We roasted 1–2-inch cubes of lean pork loin (not tenderloin) and then dehydrated it at 165 degrees until it is quite hard. It takes a long soak to become soft (4-5 hours), but it tastes great.

Plant proteins are often sold in dehydrated form and can be used as is. High protein pasta made from beans or high protein wheat is also easy. Cook it al dente and dehydrate for 4-6 hours. Quinoa is easy-peasy; rice clumps and is trickier. Under-cooking it reduces clumping but enhances crunchiness when re-hydrated. Bulgar, faro, and barley are nice, but take longer soaks. Grains and most pasta have sharp edges that puncture plastic vacuum seal bags so I packed my grains in paper or mylar bags I then slid into the vacuum seal bag.

Surprising Salads

We were most surprised by our successful salads. Dehydrate shredded vegetables mixed with vinegar powder and/or lemon powder re-hydrate to crisp salads. It is like eating coleslaw on the 2^nd day after it is made. Dehydrated raw carrots are crisp(ish) and tasty with a 2-hour soak.

Photo Caption: Homemade dehydrated pear and cabbage salad for mailed resupply box.

A Walk Through Our Mailed Resupply Boxes by Meal

Breakfast

The Historian likes breakfast. Anniversary is a good girl and eats breakfast.

When I hiked in 1975, I ate grits for breakfast every morning. Now, that is too much of a carbohydrate dump for me. Up goes the blood sugar only to crash down soon after.

As currently planned, we will have grain (oatmeal and wheat bran), nuts, dried fruit, and yogurt powder for breakfast. The yogurt powder not tasty like the yogurt I make with milk from the farm down the road, but it is edible, and it has probiotics in it. I made cowboy coffee every morning on the trail in 1975 but gave it up for instant coffee on this trip. No messy coffee grind trash to pack out.

Morning Snack

Our morning snack is composed of seeds, beans, and dehydrated fruit. Pumpkin seeds have an amazing weight to calorie ratio: 170 calories in ¼ cup, or just a fraction over 1 ounce. I would like to say that we dehydrated enough from our garden grown pumpkins, but reality is that we bought commercial organic sprouted ones. Other commercial, organic snacks include roasted chickpeas and lupini beans. They have a satisfying saltiness that meets the same craving (almost) that empty-calorie potato chips do. The final contribution to morning snack is home-dehydrated fruit.

Captain: Each mailed resupply box has three sets of daily snacks for 5 days, 2 people

Lunch

When I hiked in 1975, I daily ate peanut butter and honey on bread. My ¼” closed cell foam sleeping pad was my breadbox. I rolled the cheap, overly soft white bread in the sleeping pad before I strapped it to the top of my external frame pack. It was important to not squish my bread. I don’t know why it mattered, as soon as I spread peanut butter on it, the inside of the bread rolled away from the crust and created something more akin to a roly-poly bug than a sandwich. 

This trip I plan to eat re-hydrated beans and salads from my mailed resupply, rather than squished bug bread. I read a hiker’s story of the Pacific Crest Trail in which they bartered dehydrated food, and one pack of re-fried beans was worth two packs of anything else. I love beans so I don’t plan to get rich bartering them. A meal that will make its appearance often is chicken tortillas. We dehydrated shredded chicken and salsa to go with purchased tortillas.

Our surprising slaws will be a cornerstone of lunch, as will dehydrated carrots and dehydrated hummus. We will toss the carrots into our soaking jar at breakfast. For variety, we have tabbouleh with dehydrated lemon and tomatoes from last summer’s garden.

Photo Caption: Lunch options from the mailed resupply box contains home dehydrated beans and salads including rainbow slaw, carrots, hummus, pinto beans, chicken, mixed quinoa

Afternoon Snacks

In 1975, I ate a lot of “GORP,” aka, good old raisins and peanuts. Like most people, I added M & M candy. My budget was very small and my appetite was not. I started putting a box of commercial breakfast cereal in my bag to stretch the whole. Sometimes I added two boxes of cereal: sugar, tropical fats, preservatives, food dye, and ultra processed wheat. In the light of modern nutrition science, it seems as appealing as my roly-poly bug sandwich.

For my mailed resupply box, my grown-up self is throwing caution to the wind and has included a meat stick a day. I tried to dehydrate healthy options from cows we knew (well, we knew the farmers) but it was impractical. Our local membership club store got a brand that claims to be responsibly raised with and prepared with no preservatives, minimal salt, and no sugar, so I bought 8 bags. We also will entice ourselves with a low sugar, high fiber, chocolate-nut bar, and roasted edamame. Who could pass up such a tremendous treat?

End of Day Reward

One of my concerns about staying on track was the 4 pm “sinking spell”. I could imagine being a couple of miles from the targeted camp for the day and wanting to just lie down on the trail and stop. Enter the reward system. Here is a snack.

Enhance the reward (snack). Make it chocolate. Both The Historian and I love chocolate. We once lived near a Ben & Jerry’s outlet store. We had to move.

After careful contemplation, I selected an organic, responsibly raised, no sugar, no synthetic sugar, whey protein drink, in chocolate! We can lure ourselves along and provide protein for our muscle repair. We have even committed .4 of an ounce weight to a shaker ball.

Dinner

Dinner is a highlight in the day for us. We enjoy beautiful food, the time spent making it, time spent looking at it, and the time spent eating it. Weight dedicated to a stove we can cook on felt like a worthy choice. 

We home-dehydrated 54 different meals. There are a few that we have only one or two of, and some, like chicken and dressing with gravy, that we have enough for once in two weeks.

Photo Caption: Dinners in the mailed resupply box offers home dehydrated dinner meals (plus two commercial ones) including power green bowl, peanut stew, barley, chickpea tomato curry, lentil curry, cream of spinach pasta, three sister stew, and others

Dessert

Did I mention we like to eat? Our elderly Aunt today said, over her birthday lunch, “I guess I see how you can eat so much.” She was referring to the whole-grain nature of our foods and the abundance of fruits and vegetables. One of the things we like to eat is a post-dinner snack. Typically, it is homemade yogurt based. For this trip, we worked out a few dandy recipes for banana pudding, rice pudding, and bananas with gingerbread. Each two week mailed supply box contains 5 deserts for the two weeks.

Picture Caption: Mailed resupply boxes even include vacuum sealed bags of homemade dehydrated rice pudding, banana pudding, gingerbread, and pumpkin pie pudding.

Mailed Resupply Conclusion

It won’t be possible to know if we got this right or wrong until we start walking and start eating. The person who is mailing the boxes to us is brave, strong, and true. We warned her the boxes were heavy and she reminded us they were the same weight as her dogs’ food bags. She has spectacular search and find champion dogs and I am sure they eat like thru hikers as active as they are. We will trust her that she can get these boxes to us.

My packed fear is that we don’t have enough easy to manage whole foods. My packed fear is that we have too much. In reality, if we have too little, we can add more along the way. If we have too much, we can share with other hikers. I feel like I should tell my fear to sit down and chill and have a bite to eat.

For those of you who would be curious about the actual meals and the nutritional make up of them, here is the spreadsheet of the dinners.

Photo Caption: spreadsheet showing home dehydrated meals with nutritional data for the total of all mailed resupply boxes

References

(1) Mcallister, G. (2013). Recipes for adventure: Healthy, hearty & homemade backpacking recipes. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.

(2) Mcallister, G. (2021). Recipes for adventure II: The best of trail bytes. Backpacking Chef Publishing.

(3) Aksamit, I. (2017). The hungry spork: A long distance Hiker’s guide to meal planning. Pacific Adventures Press.

(4) Aksamit, I. (2019). The Hungry Spork Trail Recipes: Quick Gourmet Meals for the Backcountry. Pacific Adventures Press.