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Food Food is good. I ate a lot of it. I have considerable experience with backcountry canoeing and backpacking. Cooking while bicycle touring is considerable easier to deal with than when backpacking or canoeing since it is easy to stop at a restaurant, grocery store, or roadside stand whenever necessary. People gave me lots of "advice" on nutrition during this trip. I am very wary of people who espouse their advice as sage-like expertise. Some say that carbo-loading (eating lots of pastas, grains, and sugars) is the way to go. Others push a high-protein diet. This advice usually sounds the same as the current diet phenomena occuring in our country I considered eating solely at restaurants but that is very expensive and usually not as filling as I usually like. I also considered using only freeze-dried, prepackaged meals but they too are expensive and not easy to acquire (unless I want to carry weeks worth at a time). The best solution is a combination of food sources that provide good nutrition at good economy. I carried some freeze dried foods as emergency rations, for when I did not feel like cooking a complicated meal, and for when I was plain old not prepared (already passed the last grocery store for the day). Early in the trip I had difficulty eating a lot of food. I wasn't intentionally trying to pack it in. Instead I was just trying to eat as much as I normally do. My appetite just wasn't too great. After talking with other cyclists on the route a few reported the same thing. Hydration is an important part of being able to eat right. I took Centrum complete, a daily multivitamin, to make up for any deficiencies I may have had my diet. Centrum provides the USRA of most essential vitamins and minerals. I also took between 800 and 1600 mg of ibuprofen each day after developing achilles tendonitis early in the first week of my trip. The doctor I saw in Damascus, Virginia prescribed a week's course of Prednisone which increased my appetite greatly. Many cyclists take ibuprofen as a profilactic against tendonitis. It's important to take it with food since it can be a stomach irritant. Here are some sites that discuss bicycle camping cooking: Related sites
Food calorie databases |
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