If you’ve never done a multi-day hike before, ‘What to eat on the trek’ will be one of your biggest questions. While a lot of it comes down to personal preference, there are a couple of important things to consider. Careful meal planning is essential for backpackers and will require more thought than meal preparation at home because food on the trek has a different focus.

As you will carry all your food and burn more calories than usual, you need to consider weight, nutritional value and ease of preparation more than taste. Freeze dried meals meet these criteria for backpacking food perfectly but used to be an imposition until a few years ago. The taste was awful; they were heavily processed and incredibly salty and offered very little variation. Luckily that has changed and most freeze-dried meals we’ve tried recently, from Trek ‘n Eat, Back Country, The Outdoor Gourmet Company and Mountain House to name just a few, were actually quite good.

While a cooked dinner sounds nice after a long day hiking, the extra weight of un-dehydrated ingredients, effort of cooking on a tiny stove and hassle of washing pots and pans, we think isn’t really worth it. By now we even make do without plates and instead only take a large bowl each. If you stick with dehydrated meals and don’t mind eating straight out of the bag, you don’t even need the bowl.