Your Expedition food is very important, you need a lot of calories as you will be burning them faster than you would imagine.

There are many manufacturers of suitable ready prepared expedition food but you will need to do some research to see which one will work best for you ,some examples here.

If you are going to use this type of food then there are two main types, ‘wet’ food will just require heating as it already contains the water, the downside of this is it can be quite heavy especially on a four day expedition, that’s a lot of packets of food! It is also quite costly on the gas front, you will generally need to be boiling water for up to 10 minutes to heat this food, generally called ‘boil in the bag’ as this is exactly what you do with it.

The other option is ‘dehydrated’ food such as the products found at Simply Hike and Cotswold Outdoor, this food is precooked and then the water removed leaving a very light food that just needs water adding to it, the great advantage of this is it is generally very high in calories and all the other nutrients you need without carrying a huge weight, I generally find it less than a quarter of the weight of other expedition foods. It also cooks much easier as you only need to boil the water once and add it to the packet, it will then rehydrate over the next ten minutes and is ready to eat.

There are plenty of other options for food on expedition such as pasta, noodles, etc this will need to be cooked in a similar manner to how it would be prepared at home, it’s just a little more awkward over a small cooking stove and requires a little more thought.

I would always encourage a D of E group to cook at least one meal from scratch as I think it is a good experience, the first evening is probable the best for this as they can then carry and use fresh food for the first day and rely on pre-prepared expedition food for the rest of their journey.

Main meals will need to be supplemented by snacks through the day, these are going to be a personal preference but make sure that they are nutritious and filling, there’s nothing worse than working hard all day walking on the hill and being hungry at the same time, snacks should be carried where they are easily accessible without stopping and having to take your rucksack off.