I heard a lot of silly and irrational sounding theories regarding food, and calories, and frequency of eating, and more things I don't care about on the Pacific Crest Trail.
Despite my detailed explanation of the hiker food situation, I felt it necessary to share the following hiker food advice. Not because I followed it, or support adherence to it, but because it provides novice hikers an arbitrary point of reference for deciding what to put in their mouths and chew on along the PCT.
So without further ado:
How exhilarating.
Basically, all this post is devoted to telling you is that many thru-hikers consider 100 calories per ounce to be the magic number. Simply put, divide calories by ounces and see if your result equals 100 or more. If it does, you may put it in your mouth, chew, and swallow.
So who are the heavy hitters when it comes to winning the math behind hiker food?
- Peanut Butter
- Basically any nut (or combination of nuts)
- Olive oil (I found olive oil to be impractical on the trail)
- Snickers (then Milky Way, then 3 Musketeers)
- Chips (Doritos, Pringles, Fritos, Ruffles, etc.)
- All M&M varieties
- Practically anything associated with Little Debbie
- Pop-tarts!
- Most cheeses (yes, you can pack out cheese)
But, ounces, calories, grams, that's a lot of things to remember. I think I might need a useless app on my phone to figure all this out.
No, you don't! If you can learn how many ounces are in a pound (16), how many pounds are in a kilogram (2.2), and how many grams a kilogram is (1,000), then you will be ready to impress everyone with your magical and calculator-less math skills.
Here's a cheat sheet for all those tricksy units of measurement:
GRAMS
- 1 g = 0.035 oz
- 1 g = 0.002 lb
- 1 g = 0.001 kb
OUNCES
- 1 oz = 28.35 g
- 1 oz = 0.0625 lb
- 1 oz = 0.028 kg
POUNDS
- 1 lb = 453.59 g
- 1 lb = 16 oz
- 1 lb = 0.45 kg
KILOGRAMS
- 1 kg = 1000 g
- 1 kg = 35.27 oz
- 1 kg = 2.2 lbs
Happy eating!
I have found that butter in a zip lock bag will last four days, by which time I’ve eaten it. Of course my experience has all been on the Appalachian Trail — we are going to attempt the PCT next year — but butter we could eat even when the olive oil others were carrying was frozen into the bottle or leaking. Got the idea of carrying butter from a kid who was eating a lot of bagels and cream cheese who we met in northern Virginia. Everyone wanted to know how she avoided it spoiling and the answer was she always ate it within 3-4 days.
Or you could do the obvious thing and just forgo eating butter.
Probably I’m stupid but if 1 cup = 87g, 4 cups = 348g. 348 x 0.035 = 12.18oz.
A cup is a unit of volume and a gram is a unit of weight so this conversion doesn’t quite work out 🙁
Thanks!
Sometimes very hard to understand these units here in Europe.:)
How much is “one cup” exactly?
One cup is 237 milliliters.
Not to be dense (see what I did there?) but how do you eat the nut butter? I thought I read you ditched your long-handled spoon and titanium mess kit? Do you dip PB with doritos or somesuch?
I ditched my cooking supplies, but I held onto my spork – tis invaluable on the trail. Trail pro tip: never lend out your spork/spoon/eating utensil.