When you travel, you need to keep fueled up to really enjoy the sights and the experiences you’re getting. Eating is as important as having a safe and comfortable place to sleep, even if you’re roughing it and staying somewhere rustic. When you travel, it can be useful to keep some kind of snacks with you, even when you’re far away from any kind of restaurant or grocery store.
The military has their MREs, or meals ready to eat, for just this kind of problem. Traveling burns a lot of calories, especially when you’re walking around all of the time. Even for civilians who have no food prep experience to speak of, it’s possible to make your own MRE equivalent. In some cases, you can even do so on a reasonably low budget.
Acting Like Bear Grylls
When you’re in a far off place, you’re still going to get as hungry as you would if you were at home. When this happens, it may momentarily seem like a good idea to simply forage around for whatever you can find. While this might work for some people, the highest likelihood is that it won’t work for you when you most need it to do so.
Do you know what kinds of insects are safe to eat? Do you speak the local language to even ask what’s reasonably good-tasting and healthy? Are you able to build traps to catch small animals, and are you then able to properly prepare the meat? Do you know what local plants would be safe, instead of making you heave all night? If the answers to those questions aren’t resounding yeses where you are right now, as well as where you’re going, foraging is probably not a good idea for you.
Making a Plan
Many people think that to plan out your food, you have to build spreadsheets, have complicated recipes, and necessarily be the traveling equivalent of Julia Child. Fortunately, nothing could be further from the truth. When you begin to plan, you have to start with the basics. Your macros are the most important part, followed by portability.
Building a portable meal involves understanding how many calories you need, as well as how many fats, how many carbohydrates (preferably complex ones), and how much protein you need. To do this, it can be useful to buy in bulk at a place like boxed.com/products/category/357/nuts-seeds. From there, you can determine how much of every macronutrient you need, and then split them up into units you can enjoy without having to put in much thought.
When you put most of your thought in at the beginning, you can later focus on the joy of traveling instead of just thinking about your food. You may also end up avoiding a potentially dangerous trip to a medical facility after scavenging something dodgy. Planning ahead and making healthy snack choices from the beginning can help you enjoy your trip a lot more.
