In this episode of the Primitive Camping and Bushcraft Podcast, Chris Speir discusses the essential role food plays in outdoor survival, sharing practical tips on meal planning and energy maintenance during camping trips. From canned meats to freeze-dried meals, Chris provides insights on balancing weight, calories, and nutrition for successful wilderness adventures.
Welcome back to the Primitive Camping and
Bushcraft Podcast. My name is Chris Speir
and I am going to be your guide to
enjoying the great outdoors.
Today we're going to talk about one of my
favorite subjects and it is food.
And I tell you what, when I get out into
the woods, there is nothing better than a
campfire cooked meal.
To me, I absolutely love
a campfire cooked meal.
I love making biscuits or
bread in a campfire oven.
I love scrambled eggs in the morning with
some sausage or something like that.
We're going to get into all these things
today, but we're still in the gear
section of the book,
Primitive Camping and Bushcraft.
Go ahead and swing by, pick up a copy of
that, follow along. We are on page 69.
Today's episode is going to be a little
short as far as the contents in the book,
but I got some stuff spread out here on
the table. If you're watching the video,
I've got some stuff here
I'm going to discuss and also we're going
to talk about it here on the podcast and
I'll do my best to describe
what you are seeing vividly and visually.
All right, so food equals calories and
calories equals energy.
That's a basic scientific fact, unless
they change that one too.
But anyway, when it comes down to it,
food equals calories.
And you cannot head out into the woods
and on a hiking trip or a hunting trip or
a kayaking trip or whatever.
If you don't have enough food or calories
in your system, you are
going to wear down quick.
You're going to get tired easy. You're
going to start off like I
could take over the world.
You're going to get 100,000 feet into it
and you're going to be
like, oh, I'm getting tired.
You get like a mile down the road or down
the trail or something like that.
I love some coffee. But anyway, when
you're camping, you expend tons and tons
of calories that you otherwise would not
do in your daily life.
And it's pretty simple because you're
expending, you're doing more when you're
out in the woods than you would at your
regular daily activities.
If you got an office job, you're sitting
behind a desk and you're typing away at
the computer all day,
you're not expending a lot of calories
and you're not using all the calories
that you take over a day.
That way you become a calorie surplus and
a calorie surplus is where
you start putting on weight.
That's where your body starts taking the
calories and turning them into fat and
turns into fat stores.
And the opposite is true whenever they
have what they call a
negative calorie intake.
You're in a deficit, a calorie deficit.
And everybody knows that if you go work
out and you limit yourself to the input
or intake of calories,
you become in a calorie deficit and so
then your body starts burning the fat by
turning the fat into energy.
So that's what the fat stores are for is
to save up energy from
whenever you need it.
That's why a TV shows like Alone, if you
notice on these shows, they will go out
and these dudes when you first see them,
they're like, "Man, he's a big fella."
Well, they put on all this weight in
order to go out that way because they
knew that they were not going to have the
caloric intake that they normally would.
And so they're relying on their fat
stores in between meals.
So when you're heading out to the
outdoors, you're going to plan how many
days you're going to be gone and how much
food you're going to need.
So this is easy.
If you're going to be gone for six days
and you say you're eating one to two
meals a day, if that.
Me, typically, I eat a one meal.
I'm a one meal a day guy and I'll head
out into the woods
with my one meal a day.
But when you get out there and you're
spending a lot of calories and you're
doing a lot more strenuous work, you're
going to need more
than just one meal a day.
I've gone for six days and I've had one
meal a day and I come back and I was 10
to 12 pounds lighter
than I was when I left.
And that's just because I put myself into
a calorie deficit whenever
I went out into the woods.
I started burning a lot of energy while
you're out there because you're going to
be doing all kinds of stuff.
You're going to be fishing, you're going
to be walking, you're going to be hiking,
you're going to be carrying heavy loads.
You're going to be, you know, it's going
to be hotter or colder or whatever.
You know, you're putting your body into a
position where you're
burning more energy.
So what I do to plan is I carry a limited
quantity of food and I supplement it with
hunting or fishing, you know.
And I outlined this on page 72, which is
a couple of, let's see, a couple of pages
ahead of where we're at.
You know, I bring some fish hooks to go
fishing, you know, stuff like that.
A lot of times if I'm going out into the
woods, I have a fishing pole with me.
I know I'm going fishing. I know we out
of shot or die, I'm going fishing.
If it's hunting season,
I know I'm going hunting.
And so, you know, outdoor stores have
many varieties of freeze drive foods and
different other stuff for you to take.
You know, like even Walmart, you can go
into Walmart and you can get you, you
know, some of these freeze drive foods.
But let's back up where I
was talking about fishing.
I like to supplement my food with what I
am catching or fishing for out there.
Like fish, squirrel, rabbit, raccoon, you
know, you name it, whatever.
I like to actually
supplement what I am going to eat.
All right. So now fast forward, you can
get different foods for
different types in a in the stores.
You can get it from Walmart. You can get
them from believe it or not.
Dollar Tree has freeze dried foods there
that you can put together.
You know, you're not going to make a
complete meal out of one little package,
but you're going to have to buy several
packages put together.
They have freeze dried items.
Usually with the Dollar Tree stuff, it's
going to be more like dessert type items
like berries and, you know, of the such.
You know, how long do you plan on being
out there and what kind of
food do you want to take?
And so what I did is I'm not going to
give you a full grocery
list of things to take today.
And we're not going to do that here.
But what I'm going to do is I'm going to
give you a couple of items of food for
thought items that a lot
of people don't think about.
I'll give you that at
the end of this episode.
But, you know, in the meantime, let's go
over some of the things.
If you're watching the video, I have some
things listed out here on the table and
we're going to go over these.
And I'm going to just give you some ideas
and some foods for thought.
No pun intended with the foods part.
So first up is going to be canned meats.
Now, everybody knows that canned meats
and canned foods is going to weigh a lot.
So if you're if you're having a some kind
of conveyance out to the woods like a
boat or ATV or horseback or, you know,
something to that effect, then it is
going to be easier for you to have canned
meats with you or to
bring canned foods with you.
And the reason why is because you don't
have to carry it the whole way.
All right.
So but canned meats and
this is one of my favorites.
Spam.
Spam in a can is one of
my all time favorites.
You can use it for so
many different things.
And if you notice here on the table, I
also have a pack of dried beans.
Now we're going to get to
these a little bit later.
This is one of those
multi bean soup mixes.
You know, it's a ham flavored stuff.
It has the salt pack and
the flavoring packs in there.
So this is a very, very high
density, high protein meal.
Has a lot of dietary fiber in it.
It has some sodium in it.
It does not have any cholesterol, but
this thing is amazing and will be a great
pick me up when you
get out into the woods.
But what I jumped ahead for with that is
because you can cube up the spam and put
in there with your beans and
you can actually add to it.
Now a one pound bag of beans in the woods
is going to last you a long time.
You can actually have three or four meals
out of that one pound bag of beans.
Now the problem with that is the spam
once you open it, you
are on limited time frame.
You're going to have to cook it.
You cook it.
It would last a day or so
depending on the temperature.
But you know, pretty much after a day,
I'm not going to eat this stuff, you
know, unless I boil it down and make sure
all the bacteria and the bad bacteria
and viruses are bad bacteria is gone.
But this stuff right here
is pretty much it is finite.
It is going to spoil.
It is going to start decaying
the moment you pop that seal.
All right, but this stuff is good for you
as far as it has a lot of fats in there
and you need a lot of fats when you're
out into the woods because the fats
convert it convert little convert into
some energies and your brain needs to
have the fats to operate stuff like that.
So you have to have fat and unlike what
people think in today's society.
Oh, I'm on a fat free diet.
Good luck.
Good luck because you
have to have fats to survive.
You have to.
All right, so moving
from there and canned meats.
We also got like fish steaks.
I love fish steaks, sardines, fish
steaks, stuff like that to come in a can.
These things are great
little quick launches.
They're real great real protein snacks
and you can actually cook some rice and
put these this fish over that rice and
eat that that way and the rice are your
carbs and you got your protein your
carbohydrates right there.
You're good to go.
Now, I did not include any rice up here
on this on the table, but you know, you
got your instant rice that minute rice
then all it is is free drive rice.
You can bring some water to a bowl.
You throw your rice in there, cover it up
and five minutes
later, you're good to go.
Your rice is good and you know, that
stuff is lightweight.
It's very easy to bring with you and you
know to go with some kind of meat or some
beans or something like
that is like amazing stuff.
So that's the canned meats.
There's other canned meats out there, you
know, like Vienna sausages.
You can get Benny weenies and you can get
different, you know, devil's food, you
know, stuff like that.
Different kinds of canned meats.
There's let's see the corned beef and
hash, you know, corned beef.
You get potty meats.
You can get Vienna sausages.
You can there's other meats out there and
you can have a canned meat with you.
But the problem with canned
stuff is that they take up a lot.
They not take up a lot of room.
But they weigh a lot.
All right.
So they're going to drag you down when
you got five or six of
these cans right here.
You have an extra three pounds on you
because this this is a
heavy this thing's heavy.
Let's see how much it is.
This is 12 ounces.
So one thing of food is 12 ounces.
That's like what four ounces shy of a
pound and you know, that's that's crazy.
It's 340 grams, you
know, net weight 12 ounces.
So you got 12 ounces
right here, almost a pound.
So if you got four of these, that's four
pounds that you're
carrying around in the woods.
Let's look at the it's a
three point seven five ounces.
All right.
So fish steaks are not as heavy as the
spam, but it's not as dense either.
So but these have these
pack a lot of protein in them.
Now, since we're talking about protein
densities and stuff like
that, let's move on over to this.
Peanut butter.
This little container of peanut butter
right here is let's
see what the weight is.
The net weight.
This is 12 ounces.
This weighs exactly the same as this.
But with this right here, you're getting
more bang for the buck.
And the reason why is
because this is where to go.
This is 180 calories per serving and a
serving is a two-ounce slice
and this is 190 calories per
tablespoon.
All right.
And this has 10
servings and this has six.
So you're getting more out of this.
Well, not only that,
this has all your proteins.
It has your 16 grams of fat.
It has this sodium that you're going to
need in there when you
get out into the woods.
You need the sodiums.
They're finding out now that a lot of a
lot of these issues with migraines and
stuff like that is because people are not
in taking enough salt.
Fiber is two grams of fiber.
It's got your carbohydrates, six grams of
carbohydrates, got sugars, three grams of
sugars and seven grams of protein.
And so that is in one tablespoon, you
know, or two tablespoons.
I'm sorry.
Yet two tablespoons per serving.
And so I got a real quick down and dirty
real life scenario for this.
So I was on a trip and it was the same
trip that we made the water filter with
that I discussed last week in the last
episode.
And we were we were just running down and
we weren't catching any fish.
We bought a between two guys.
We brought one pound of beans, one a
little bit of rice and we got a summer
sausage and then I
brought this and I brought this
same size jar of peanut butter.
That's it.
That's all the food we brought for six or
eight day trip and we get out there and
we didn't catch any fish.
We weren't catching hardly any fish and
we weren't catching and we
didn't see the squirrels.
We didn't see no raccoons, but we did end
up harvesting a armadillo.
So we ate the armadillo, no joke.
But before we got the
armadillo, we were running out.
It was like day three or four or
something like that.
And we were just like
no energy whatsoever.
Just down and just expended so many
calories fishing and hunting and walking
back and forth and you
know collecting firewood
and stuff like that.
Plus it was kind of
warm during the daytime.
He was in the high and eighties and you
know at night it was in the sixties.
So it was pretty decent camping weather,
you know, still warm in the daytime.
But I had one of these that I brought
with me and I sat down and I took a
spoonful and immediately,
I mean immediately I felt the difference.
The moment I swallowed the first bite and
then I took it, I ate half of that jar
and a couple of minutes later
I felt like a brand spanking new man.
I didn't know if it was because of the
sugars, you know, because my body was
used to taking little
sugars and all that stuff.
I didn't know if it was the sugars or the
proteins, the fats, the you know, the
stuff like that that I needed.
But all the saturated fats and all that,
you know, but are the
salts or whatever it was.
So I told my brother, I threw the rest of
it to my brother and I ate the other half
of the can and
immediately he felt better too.
And it was like, whoa, this is crazy.
You know, a jar of peanut butter goes a
long way whenever you're out there.
So always ever since then, I've always
carried 12 ounces of peanut butter and my
food kit with me whenever
I go out into the woods.
And the reason why I do that is because
in the event of you don't have any food,
this will help you get by.
This is an awesome food item and it will
actually help reinvigorate you and give
you the energy and the stamina that you
need to press on
through whatever you're doing.
All right, so let's talk about some.
Excuse me, I got some
nasal stuff going on today.
I don't know if it's cold or not, but
let's press on to let's do some MREs.
All right, let's talk about MREs.
Now, MREs, these these are great.
If you were in the military, MREs were
the staple, a military staple.
And, you know, this one's Mexican beef.
My favorite was always the beef stew.
And I love the beef stew.
It was just my favorite MRE.
But right here in my hands, if you're not
watching the video, I have
a MRE, a Mexican beef MRE.
Now, these have been known to produce
over 2000 calories of food
if you eat everything in here.
Now, that 2000 calories
also includes the hot sauces.
It includes the creamers for your coffee,
the drinks, the coffee.
It includes everything in the kit.
So in order to get the 2000 plus
calories, you have to
eat everything in the kit.
So and it'll it'll be labeled.
What's how much is what?
Now, these are the MRE star.
These are not the true 100% military
brand, but these are very close to it.
Extremely close to it.
And I just recently did a video on a
kayaking trip where we went down the
river and we used these as a lunch.
And then also did a review on these on my
spare outdoors YouTube page.
But MREs are great.
They have all kinds of stuff, all kinds
of goodies in there.
Now, what I typically like to do is I'll
bring one MRE and I'll use that as a
lunch on the day I'm going out.
That way it generates, it gives me enough
energy to get to the end of my hike or my
boat and trip or wherever I'm going.
So I'll bring one MRE.
I like the MRE because it comes in its
own waterproof container.
It is waterproof inside there.
It's not going to get wet.
So your contents
ain't going to get ruined.
And so in the event of you have a
waterproof meal and you have one.
So you have a couple thousand calories in
there to get you through.
Now, after that, then
I'll bring other items.
So we talked about the MRE.
We talked about canned meats.
Let's skip on over to the summer sausage.
Now, I always typically bring a small
summer sausage with me.
And the reason why this is nine ounces
and they're only like a couple of bucks.
You can get a summer sausage.
And the reason why I like summer sausage
is because you do not
have to refrigerate these.
You can leave this dude in your backpack
for a couple of years.
And let's see, when does this one expire?
I don't see the expiration date.
Where is it?
Here it is right down here.
Ews by August 20th, 2025.
So I got a whole year's
worth of ews out of this.
I've had it for a while.
But these little dudes
right here are amazing.
You can use them in your dried beans.
You can use them with your breakfast.
You could cook them anytime.
You can eat them by
themselves as a snack.
Give you a little pickup.
You know, and they
only weigh nine ounces.
And these go so far.
And for two people, that is plenty right
there for two people.
Me and Dave on my kayaking trip recently,
we just we used one of these.
And both of us had that
with some eggs for breakfast.
And we were we were slam full.
We were ready for the day.
And it was good stuff.
You know, summer sausage is great.
I cannot harp on summer sausage enough
that if you're heading
out into the woods, spend
the dollar ninety nine to get you a nine
ounce thing of summer sausage.
You could cook it.
You can eat it raw.
You can boil it.
You know, you can edit TV.
You could do so much with it.
It's crazy.
Now we talked about the instant rice.
Now let's move on to to just add water
meals or jaw meals as it's called.
You know, just add water is
like the Idaho and potatoes.
These have 120 calories in them.
And these dudes right here have 10
percent or two grams of saturated fats.
You know, they got
three grams of total fats.
And you're going to need these fats when
you get out into the woods.
You know, it's got one
gram of sugars in there.
So there's a lot of carbs.
This is this is basically a 20 gram
carbohydrate meal, but it'll
give you some energy to push
on through.
And these things are awesome.
You could combine them
with your with your meats.
You can you got your canned meat.
You could throw these canned meats like
your spam, like your
your summer sausage, like
your fish steaks.
You know, you can eat that in conjunction
with your baby red mashed potatoes.
Now these baby red mashed
potatoes are just add water.
You bring some water to a bowl.
You dump the potatoes in and you stir
them up and you're ready to eat.
That's it.
That's it.
And these are 97 cents at the local
Dollar General and are a
dollar at a dollar tree,
I believe.
If you can find these,
you're not going to find it.
You'll get an off ramp.
But these Idaho and baby reds are the
best flavored fake
potatoes or mashed potatoes.
They are amazing.
I love them.
I can't say enough about them.
I even buy them to eat here at
the house with for my family.
I mean, these things are great and
they're lightweight.
This whole package, the contents of this
package is let's see
here four ounces and that is
a whole meal.
You know, this is more than a meal
because right here it
says it serves four.
So there's four servings in this bag.
So literally with a big old fatty like
me, when I get out to
the woods, I'm going to
eat this whole bag.
I will eat this whole bag.
So typically this four servings is going
to be for one person when
you're out in the woods.
And yeah, so but
anyway, that's just add water.
Now there's another one out there, you
know, pre-packaged ready to eat meals.
And you know, that's what I
talked about with the MREs.
You know, they're pre-packaged.
They're ready to eat
and they're good to go.
So we got
pre-packaged ready to eat meals.
We got just add water meals and then
packet mashed potatoes in here.
So you know, just add water.
Let's do another one.
Freeze drive meals.
This whole meal right here, and this is
best if used by September of 2053.
2053.
It's 20 some odd years.
All right.
So this whole meal
right here is three ounces.
All right.
The only downsize to
this is how bulky it is.
You know, it's kind
of like with your MRE.
Your MRE weighs a couple pounds, but this
breakfast skillet MRE
by Mountain House, not
MRE, but freeze drive meal from Mountain
House is kind of bulky.
So the whole container
has 512 calories, right?
So it's got 26 grams of
fat for the whole container.
You know, it's got 610 milligrams or 203%
of your cholesterol, your
sodium, your carbohydrates
and your proteins.
And it's got everything that you need.
These meals right here are a whole meal
and will sustain you in
the woods when you get
out there.
So freeze drive meals are amazing things.
They're lightweight.
You can carry several of them.
The only problem is, is they're very
bulky and I'm more of a,
you know, the footprint
for this right here is a lot smaller than
this several of these right here.
But you know, you got your beans and you
got your mashed
potatoes and you got your beef
summer sausage all piled up and it's
still smaller footprint than
your freeze dried breakfast
skillet.
But the other flip side to that is that
the beans and the
potatoes and the, you know,
that's going to weigh more.
So it depends when you're heading out
into the great
outdoors, you know, you're going
to do ease of use versus it's kind of
like when I was talking
about stoves in the previous
one where you're using a wood burning
stove or are you using a
propane stove, you know,
and it's just, it's, it's not, it's, it's
the same kind of situation.
So get some more coffee here.
All right, now let's move on
to a couple of little things.
You know, before you go over your
grocery, your full
grocery list on page 182 of the
book, you know, you want to start
thinking about what
you'll bring versus how much it
weighs and that's always going to be on
your mind whenever you're
going to be hiking somewhere.
Now if you're using a boat to go down
river and camp out, get
dropped off or you're taking
an airplane, getting dropped off in the
middle of that, that
really don't matter too much,
you know, because you're going to be able
to carry more weight that way.
But it's like you get dropped off and
then you have to hike a
couple of miles in there.
It's still going to be
a little bit cumbersome.
But you know, a few options to consider
are the heaviest to
lightest, you know, canned
meats are the heaviest.
You got canned meat, summer sausages, you
know, but they don't
require a refrigerator,
dry beans, instant and regular rice, just
add water meals,
prepackaged, ready to eat
meals, packet mashed
potatoes and freeze dried foods.
So that what I just read there was the
heaviest to the lightest.
So you want to use those that as a guide
to when you're going
out into the woods and
what you're going to bring
with you and take with you.
So now I'm going to move on.
I promised you earlier that I was going
to go over a couple of
little things here to
show you now right here.
What you see if you're watching the
video, I have a bottle
of five fluid ounce bottle
of Tabasco sauce, McKinley company
Tabasco pepper sauce.
And the Tabasco sauce is
amazing stuff to bring with you.
Now I don't bring them this big.
I bring a smaller one with me.
In MREs in the military, if you anybody
ever served in the
military recently, the past
25, 30 years, you saw that they had the
baby MRE Tabasco sauces in the MREs.
These MREs right here by MRE star do not
have Tabasco sauces in them.
So but the old real military ones do.
You could buy those on Amazon.
And I just saw where corporals current
corner just picked up a
bunch of them for like, you
know, 20 of them or so, you know, but I'm
pretty sure you bought them off Amazon.
But you can get them for like 20 bucks,
20 bottles for $20 on Amazon.
All right.
Now this right here, there's a reason why
I always bring this
and it's because not only
is this hell augment the flavor of your
foods, but Tabasco sauce
being a vinegar, peppery
and the ingredients of this are vinegar
and pepper also kill bacteria and germs.
Okay.
So when you're eating eggs, if you eat a
sunny side up egg, you
know, you're risking the
fact that you might have bacteria growing
or some kind of
salmonella or something like
that growing in the raw parts of the egg.
But if you put some of this Tabasco sauce
on there, this does kill the bacteria and
stuff on there.
All right.
Now that is one of my
favorite items to bring with me.
Now another little tip trick and hack I
got here is right out
of the travel section of
a Walmart and 80 cents, you can get you a
container right here
and fill it up with black
pepper like I have in
this bottle right here.
And we'll see if we can get a little bit
of sound going on for the guys listening.
All right.
So I got some black pepper in one bottle
and a another travel bottle with salt.
And this is great because when you go out
there, you never know
what you're going to
run into.
You might want to dehydrate or dry some
tans and some hides, you
know, or what just salt
them now.
But anyway, salt is good.
Salt and pepper is like a basic staple.
Now in this other bottle I have, if
you're watching the
video, it is a spray bottle.
And if you're listening, this is a travel
spray bottle for like
shampoo or conditioner
or something like that that you can get
right from the Walmart.
I have filled it up with olive oil.
And when you're heading out there, it
does not weigh a lot.
It doesn't weigh a lot at all.
And I don't have my
little scale to weigh it.
But you can fill that little thing up and
you have a squirt bottle with oil.
That way whenever you're cooking with a
stainless steel skillet or
pot, you can go ahead and
oil it down a little bit
and then throw your food.
Summer sausage has a very bad habit of
sticking to stainless steel so to spam.
So if you just go ahead and put a little
bit of oil in the
bottom of your pot, throw
them in there, you're golden.
You are good to go as far as no stick.
Now the last item I want to show here,
and this is pretty much a
item that I'm not really
going to be able to describe over the
podcast rather than the
actual video so you can see
it.
But this is a spice container.
It looks like one of those camping spice
containers where you
have one, two, three,
four, five, six, seven.
Seven little areas where you could put
onion powder, garlic
powder, Creole seasoning.
It looks like turmeric or
salt and pepper in here.
And then each container is the lid or the
bottom to the next container.
So you could put your spices and you
could rearrange them.
And you got a lid and you can unscrew
one, screw it to the
bottom and then it gives you
access to the next container.
So I've done this
several times through here.
I have salt, pepper.
I have chili powder, garlic powder,
cumin, onion powder.
Tony Sachery's are a Creole
seasoning that I like to use.
But that is a cool little nifty thing.
The only problem with this is that it
typically does not carry
enough seasoning for me.
So if I'm trying to season some beans,
say a one pound bag of
beans that I want to season,
that's not going to be enough seasoning
to season the beans as
far as onion powder or
garlic powder gives.
So that's it.
That's the little tips and tricks that I
said to hang around for and hopefully you
guys have found some use out of that.
Well anyway, that is it for this episode
and I hope you enjoyed it.
And go ahead and swing by and pick up a
copy of the Primitive
Camping at Bushcraft book.
And swing by Facebook and go ahead and
join the Primitive
Camping at Bushcraft Podcast.
Our actual group.
I'm sorry.
The Primitive Camping at Bushcraft group.
And so hopefully you
have enjoyed this episode.
I enjoyed talking about it.
Food is one of my favorite subjects.
And this is still the
gear section of the book.
So we're still moving forward.
Our next one is going
to be miscellaneous gear.
And that one is going to
be a relatively longer one.
You know we got all the way, we got, that
one is going to be
about four or five pages.
So we're going to probably have to break
that one down into two.
And then after that we'll be out of the
gear section and then
we'll be moving into shelter.
So we got a couple, one more or two more
episodes on gear and then
we'll head over to the shelter.
I hope you enjoyed this.
I'll see you next time and the next video
or the next podcast.
God bless you.
See you later.