Food & Meal Planning

Food & Meal planning guide

During weekend and summer expeditions students are responsible for providing your own dinners, breakfast, lunch, and snacks. Click here to read why TAASC has adopted such a model:

The following are a list of meal ideas that we have collected over many years on the trail:

Breakfast

We will have hot water available but it’s easier not be cooking food over the stove.

• Instant pre-packaged oatmeal and grits
• Bagels and cream cheese
• Cereal – granola, grape nuts (will need powdered milk)
• Fruit – Apple, oranges
• Tea or hot chocolate (optional)

Lunch

We do not ‘cook’ during lunch – please bring lunch food that doesn’t need cooking.

We like to use the analogy of a ‘vehicle’ and a ‘passenger’ when teaching students to pack for lunch. If you plan at least one ‘vehicle’ and one ‘passenger’ for each lunch, you and your stomach will be satisfied. Regarding ‘vehicles’ – do not bring bread as it smooshes the minute it is crammed into a backpack. Hard rolls will work better.

Vehicle	Passenger
Tortillas	Peanut Butter & Jelly
Pita Bread	Cream Cheese & Salsa
Bagels	Hummus
Crackers	Cheese & Mustard
Hard Rolls	Tuna & cheese
bread product	Salami & pepperoni

Dinner

There are many ideas out there for creating healthy, good tasting dinners. The most important consideration is ensuring your dinner is providing sufficient calories. What you eat for dinner is what keeps you warm at night and will also determine the quality of energy you have the next day.

Here are some examples of great dinners for your next TAASC trip.

You can easily add a protein to any of them (chicken, tuna) plus they’re simple to prepare and clean up is easy too.

Snacks

We recommend students pack two snacks per day and that covers their energy output. You know your child best. If they can handle monitoring their snacks then you can put all the trail mix in one bag and they know they must get 5 snacks out of it. If this sounds to challenging for your child we suggest making up 5 individual bags of snacks to help them self monitor.

• Granola, Cliff, Lara Bars – your favorite bar!
• Trail Mix – You can make your own and save money. Mix peanuts, raisins, and M&Ms together
• Cereal Bars/Snack Bars
• Pop Tarts
• String Cheese (already packaged into monitored servings)
• Carrots
• Fruit – we tell students to pack a piece of fruit a day (apples and oranges – no bananas or peaches please). Whether they eat it for breakfast, lunch or snack it is just nice to have a piece of fruit a day.
• Almonds, sunflower seeds, etc.

These are just a few ideas for snacks. We encourage the cookies and candy to be left behind. They are empty calories and do not supply the students with the nutrition they need.