E-mail A Friend Tell a friend about the information found on this page by sending them an e-mail.   Your Name: Your E-mail:   Type an e-mail address, then click add: Add a Personal Message: (Optional)

January/February 2002 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Editor’s Notebook Inside Story Feature: Harvest of goodwill À la carte Reverberations

Harvest of Goodwill (Feature) | Canadian food firsts | Just the beer facts
Food nutrition lables get a facelift | Securing a meal | Archives
The ABCs of healthy eating | Comfort food | Dining al fresco | A taste of Paris

After hiking for a few hours to seek refuge from the complexities of city life, it might seem out of place to have honey lime chicken, beef stroganoff or blueberry cobbler on the campsite menu. It’s certainly a far cry from the modest rations that sustained legendary explorers, such as Sir Ernest Shackleton, who trekked around Antarctica nibbling on cheese, biscuits and pemmican and sipping tea and cocoa. Today, weekend campers can take advantage of pre-packaged, gourmet hiking goodies that make their forays into the wilds as easy as pie – freeze-dried apple pie, if you like!

Before a holiday long weekend, hikers and campers literally clean the shelves of outdoor supply stores of dehydrated and freeze-dried food packages. The technology used to create these delicacies has been around for a long time — millennia in the case of dehydration and decades for freeze-dried food — but the products’ popularity really took off in the 1990s.

Robert Eastland, a sales associate at Mountain Equipment Co-op (MEC) in Toronto, says the pre-packaged foods are great for newcomers. "The trend I’ve noticed is that you get new campers buying this stuff for the first few times they go out. These foods facilitate the camping experience because you can just open the bag and follow instructions."

But even the most accomplished campers use these convenient edibles. "If you’re pushing the limits of going fast and far, you’ll definitely use them," says Eastland, who occasionally takes one or two on his own excursions. "They’re light and you won’t need as much fuel for cooking. Winter campers also use them since they have quick preparation times."

As the name suggests, dehydrated and freeze-dried foods are lightweight since almost all water has been removed from the product (90 percent with dehydrated and 98 percent for freeze-dried). And because the meals are pre-cooked before dehydration or freeze-drying, they cook up quickly and require less fuel, one of the heaviest supplies in a camper’s pack.

But what it gains in portability it tends to lose in taste. Despite the colourful names on the packaging, those in the know take spices along to flavour the packaged food.

However, a newer food line called "Mountain Gourmet" by Mountain Safety Research claims to have improved flavour. Certified-organic ingredients that are either vegan or vegetarian also widen their appeal to people with special dietary concerns. "This stuff rocks," says Eastland of the Mountain Gourmet line. "They are so much better-tasting."

So, if you’re looking for some easy and light food for a camping trip, you might look into the dehydrated or freeze-dried foods. Eastland says they are a good learning tool, and once you are used to camping you can experiment and make you own dehydrated foods, or buy the ingredients separately at a bulk food store. You might just find that it’s much more fun and a whole lot tastier when you make it yourself.

top