What Are Backpacking Meals And Why Are They Ideal For Adventures?
September 19, 2024 | Nahua Expeditions
Backpacking meals are essential for outdoor adventures where weight and portability are important factors. Designed to be lightweight and easy to prepare, these meals play a crucial role in ensuring a successful expedition by providing necessary nutrition to keep you fueled. In this article, we’ll explore what backpacking meals are and why they are vital for our adventures.
What Are Backpacking Meals?
Backpacking dehydrated and freeze-dried meals are specially designed food products that are lightweight, compact, and easy to prepare, making them ideal for our expeditions. Dehydrated meals are made by removing moisture through air-drying, while freeze-dried meals are processed by freezing and then removing the water under vacuum. Both methods reduce their weight and significantly extends shelf life, while retaining most of the original nutrients. They both require just the addition of hot water to re-hydrate and prepare, offering a convenient and efficient way to pack high-nutrient, pre-made meals into the wilderness.
They serve purposes and functions beyond just backpacking; such as for military personnel, and long term food stashes for survival applications. For the purpose of backpacking and outdoor adventure travel, you will most likely find them being sold in “pouches” or “resealable bags”. They are sold in a variety of different flavours or recipes, and sold by many different brands worldwide. They can be most commonly found in outdoor shops, or online.
In this article, we’ll refer to individual meals as “pouches.” However, terms like “freeze-dried,” “dehydrated,” and “backpacking food” all refer to the same category of food products.
Why Are Backpacking Meals Ideal For Adventures?
Backpacking meals play a crucial role in wilderness expeditions. They provide the necessary energy and nutrients required for the physically demanding activities we partake in. These meals are also designed to be easy to prepare and carry, which is essential when you’re on the move and need to minimize your pack weight.
For our expeditions, the name of the game is “lightweight”. This is a term we keep at the forefront of all of our decisions when planning and preparing for an expedition. Everything from our gear, to clothes, to food is aimed at being lightweight. The reason for this is because our expeditions require us to be self-sufficient, and we rarely have the luxury of re-supply’s. Essentially, we need to be able to carry an entire week’s worth of supplies in our bags.
Whilst we are accustomed to doing multi-day expeditions without backpacking pouches, that approach requires much more meticulous planning, prep work, variety of products, and experience. In addition, to match the nutrients you get in a pre-made pouch, it becomes necessary to use more food, ultimately resulting in heavier loads. Often times during our expeditions we will find ourselves needing to traverse challenging terrain which can be very difficult with heavier packs.
What's Next?
If you’re getting ready for an upcoming adventure, consider reading our article “How We Provision Meals For Our Expeditions”. This post will guide you, in depth, on everything you will need to know to prepare for one of our expeditions.