The Paleo Canoe Trip

So I went canoeing. On Lake Superior. 11 lonely days far, far away from my oven and slow-cooker and beloved jar of coconut oil. We were not allowed to bring any glass containers or aluminum cans, due to the regulations of the park we were camping in, so there was no jarred/canned food. And I actually stayed mostly Paleo in the process (by my own relatively relaxed standards of "Paleo"). Here's what I ate:


Dehydrated Eggs: here. They're literally nothing but eggs, dehydrated and packaged. No weird preservative crap. Unsurprisingly, they taste like eggs. You'd be hard-pressed to boil them, but they're fine scrambled, or cooked into a curry or stew for extra protein.

Dehydrated potatoes: here. Again, they're potatoes. They look like potatoes, they smell like potatoes, they quack like potatoes. Even my mother loved these - they're basically pre-cut for hash browns, so they cook up really quickly even over a wood fire. Note that a 6lb bag is HUGE; I didn't realize it would be so big because I usually eat about 5lbs of potatoes a week, but obviously these are dehydrated potatoes so the bag actually accounts for much more than 6lbs of food. Derp.

Foil packs of tuna and salmon (from Wal-Mart). I got them packed in EVOO, for extra calories. Yum.

Pemmican: here. It tastes like grainy, waxy nothingness, but it's the magical food of instant energy. I ate it in roughly 600-calorie chunks, which you can just pick up and eat with your fingers if you don't mind getting a little greasy, and I felt awesome after a pemmican meal, ready to jump right up and canoe across the whole lake by myself. C- on flavor; A++ for function. I'd buy it again in an instant for another trip. They say you need to refrigerate it but I had 0 issues with it unrefrigerated for close to 2 weeks (counting the travel time to get up there), and I was eating it until the end of the trip.

Kerrygold. I refused to stoop to Wal-Mart butter, even in the wilderness. I may have a Kerrygold problem.

Onions. We had originally brought carrots as well, but the carrots got moldy. The onions, however, persevered like the champions they are. There will be no scurvy in the Paleo tribe!

EVOO (for cooking). Because I don't do seed oils, but my father eats a low-cholesterol diet. Fortunately, olive oil is common ground.

Mixed Nuts and Larabars. This is really what I mean by "mostly" Paleo: I ate way more nuts than is good for me on this trip and my stomach regretted it, but I had to get the calories in somehow. Not optimally healthy by any means, and if I had to do it again, I'd look a little harder for alternatives because I was emotionally responding very poorly to the GORP after a few days, and really started falling into disordered eating patterns with it. It doesn't help that my mother made this super deluxe GORP with all kinds of dehydrated pineapple and papaya and craisins and cashews and almonds and stuff. Delicious...way too delicious.

Wild blueberries, raspberries, and Saskatoon berries: world's most Paleo fruit: I literally had to climb up rocks to get them, which I did with great enthusiasm and frequency, and was usually rewarded by a feast at the top. Delicious, especially the blueberries. I am spoiled for supermarket blueberries forever.

Black coffee and caffeine pills. Because I had planned for summer, without realizing that "summer" on Lake Superior apparently means 7 degrees Celsius at night. So I spent most of the nights lying awake trying not to freeze to death, listening to my brother snore. By the end of the trip I was pretty darn grouchy.

So, what did I eat every day?

Breakfast: Coffee; 3 "eggs," scrambled with 1 "potato" and 2 tbsp. Kerrygold. This took about 5 minutes to cook even over an open fire. Delicious and filling.

Lunch: pouches of tuna with GORP, or a chunk of pemmican. More caffeine.

Dinner: either fish curry with the rest of the family or more tuna/pemmican.

Snacks: GORP, Larabars, occasionally squeeze packs of almond butter (although I only had like 2 of those the entire trip because I accidentally bought the unsalted ones and they were pretty blah). And more caffeine.

I probably averaged around 2500 calories/day although I wasn't really counting. More than I usually eat, but I don't usually spend 6-8 hours a day shivering my ass off while paddling a canoe in the rain, either. Didn't noticeably gain or lose any weight, but then again for 11 days I'm not surprised. Although I think I may have been eating a slight surplus because since getting back I've noticed a serious drop-off in hunger; I just don't want over about 1500 calories/day.

It was pretty repetitive, but you don't go on canoe trips for the fine dining experience. And I didn't really get bored; I was too busy doing other things and just wanted something to eat so I wasn't hungry and could go climb up another rock. It was definitely better than the restaurant food I got on either end of it...ugh, mystery oils are disgusting. GTFO with your damn canola.

Things I will bring next time:
-Jerky. Duh. Don't know how I missed that one.
-More pemmican.
-More eggs and potatoes. I would rather eat twice that amount for breakfast and skip my midmorning snack.
-Duck fat. To cook the potatoes.
-Sweet potatoes, beets, and turnips, for the first few days. The thing I missed most was vegetables.
-Avocados, at least for the first few days.
-Foil packs of olives. I hate 100 calorie packs on principle, but olives >>> GORP for snacks.

Overall I'm fairly proud of myself for doing that well on the first try, and extremely glad that I don't need to eat for my brother's appetite (he had to eat about twice as much as I did...every time I turned around another PowerBar was going down the hatch).