Consider hiking food.

It is broken down into several sub-sections: breakfast, mid-morning snack, lunch, mid-afternoon snack, dinner, after-dinner snack, and before bed cocoa and cookies. A pre-breakfast snack is optional.

Breakfast can be composed of gooey oatmeal, lumpy Instant Breakfast, stale doughnuts, burnt biscuit mix, rubbery pancakes, or quickly gobbled noodle dinners. If this does not appeal, one can always skip the hike and eat at IHOP. On second thought, what’s the difference?

Lunches are composed of stale bagels, peanut butter (either frozen or melted, depending on the locale) moldy cheese, strangely smelling bologna, liquid candy bars, lumpy instant pudding (and hearken unto thee, it is not the pudding lumps but the instant milk lumps which cause strong men to cry and strong women to quietly have hysterics) graham crackers, chocolates, raisins, rye krisp, and a dram of instant lemonade. Or the affluent may purchase at exorbitant prices a Trail Pak lunch from a major retailer comprised of graham crackers, chocolate, raisins, rye krisp, and a dram of instant lemonade.

Dinner may be composed of Lipton Noodle Main Dish Dinners (noodles, sauce, and meat), Betty Crocker Noodle Dinners (Noodles and sauce), poor but honest hiker dinners (noodles, butter, sausage, bologna, or mystery meat), or absent-mindedly-packing-for-the-hike-dinner-10-minutes-before-you-leave dinner (noodles). Or one may cave into the materialistic hiking store procurers and purchase freeze-dried repasts such as Turkey Tetrazini, Lasagna, Chicken-a-la-King, or Kung Pao Chicken, most of which taste a lot like noodles, sauce, and stringy mystery meat.

Meals can be cooked in a pot. In fact, it is highly recommended that noodle dinners be so cooked. A pot can consist of the saucepan section of a mess kit, a coffee can, an empty glass jar, a hallowed-out rock, or a bandana, if you cook really fast. An emergency pot can be constructed from a tube tent, cut up and folded into shape, in which you place hot rocks in it to boil the water. Such an emergency might occur when you use your pot for an open canteen, a hat, a daypack, or hung from your belt to conceal holes in your pants.

Snacks are inclusive of M&Ms, lemon candies, mints, nuts, lemonade, limeade, orangeade, apples, cookies, kippered herrings, petite fours, lobster Cantonese, and pheasant under grass (glass will break). Snacks are useful for resting, waiting for lost hikers to get un-lost, puzzling over topo maps, picking up rocks that you can’t carry out so you just take close-up pictures of, and luring yourself along the trail by promising your weary bod a rest and sustenance if it can only drag itself along to the top of the next butte.

Meals are good times to dispose of extra weight in your pack by consumption of food. They are also good for reviewing all the fantastic, beautiful, rare and wonderful things that everyone else saw along the trail, but you somehow missed.

As any hiker will tell you, after 14 miles on the trail, food is more valued than precious gems, exotic furs, cold cash (even before taxes), a Rolls Royce, or a 900-power down sleeping bag. Uncrushed potato chips are worth all these and your first-born child.

Alternatively you can skimp on food and when others find they brought too much and offer to share, produce a grasping hand and an eager happy-to-help-out smile. If they do not offer to share, adopt the classic Puppy Dog Eyes, and begin to drool discretely into your boots. In any case, food is rightly one of the ten essentials. One may live 30 days without food, but one becomes an undesirable and testy trail companion about 29 and a half days prior to this extreme. So do yourself and your hiking buds a favor and invest in trail substance.