Multi-Day Food: Count It, Buy It, Repack It

Rationing mistakes are rarely about taste. They are about arithmetic: people pack by feel, run a deficit by day three, and then cannot understand why the afternoon climb felt so hard.

The five steps

1. List the menu by day. Breakfast, snacks, lunch, dinner, hot drinks — days × people, written down. Not estimated at the shop.
2. Estimate calories from your own baseline. Use what you actually ate on previous trips; raise it for heavy packs, cold, and long days; lower it for heat and low effort. There is no universal gram count, so do not copy someone else's.
3. Choose light food. Nuts, oats, milk powder, pasta, rice, dehydrated vegetables, oil, energy bars. Go easy on tins and fresh food, which are mostly water.
4. Repack. Strip the retail packaging and portion into one bag per meal, labelled with contents and date. Less weight, less volume, less rubbish.
5. Test at home. Never eat a new food for the first time on the mountain. Check taste, how long it takes to cook, and how your stomach responds.

Eating through the day

• Breakfast: enough carbohydrate plus some fat. Then eat a little every 60–90 minutes while moving, rather than waiting until you are ravenous.
• Lunch can be cold. Dinner should be hot — a hot meal and a hot drink do real work on morale and recovery.
• If you sweat heavily, replace salt with salty snacks or electrolytes. Sweet food alone is not enough.
• Keep one meal in reserve as emergency food. Do not eat it on day one.

Water

• Read the route for water sources: which are reliable, which may be dry, where you have to carry. Do not assume the map's blue line is flowing.
• Carry enough capacity — commonly 2–4 L (about 70–135 fl oz), adjusted for the longest dry stretch — and treat every source.
• Keep camp water and drinking water separate, and cook at least 200 ft (60 m) from the source.

Stoves and fuel

• Estimate fuel from days, people, and how often you boil water or melt snow. Err on the high side.
• Canister performance drops in the cold. Use a stove suited to altitude and cold, and learn to judge how much gas is left.
• Carry a spare lighter and waterproof matches.

Common mistakes

• Snacks only, no real meals — and a slow collapse in energy by afternoon.
• Packing "just in case" food and carrying it home again.
• No emergency meal, so a storm day becomes a hunger day.
• Trying new food on the trip, and losing a day to it.