2000

Adventures With Uncle Wally (Freeze-dried) by Uncle Wally

Freeze-dried food sure ain’t what it used to be. And that’s a darned good thing.

Back three decades or so when the freeze-dried phenomenon first hit the free market, the stuff seemed like a dream come true to backcountry travelers. It was light, compact, easy to fix, and you didn’t even hafta wash the dishes afterward! What else could you ask for?

Well, taste, for one thing. And that’s where the dream turned kinda nightmarish. No matter what sorta fancy, gourmet name was slapped on the outside of those petite, foil packets, the stuff on the inside all tasted like it had been shaken outta the same, dusty apothecary jars outta the back room of some high school chemistry lab somewhere. They just added salt.
And then there was the issue of serving size. I don’t think the manufacturers were takin’ the real-life appetites of their target market into account when calculatin’ how much oughtta be in a dinner. Seems like their dinner portions were based on the daily caloric intake of your average, anorexic super model, not your average, famished-and-not-gonna-take-it-anymore paddler or backpacker.

In brief, the stuff tasted awful and there wasn’t enough of it. Now, that might seem like a blessing, at first glance. But brief reflection on the nature and extent of the backcountry traveler’s food supply suggests it’s actually more of a double penance.

So, what to do? Now ya had to decide what was more important: what you were gonna hafta carry or what you were gonna hafta eat. As if life didn’t already hand us enough bad trade-offs.

Well, sometimes the choice seems easy. One week of totin’ frozen steaks, slabs of bacon, and real eggs over every inch of elevation the Boundary Waters has to offer is often enough to make your shoulders convince your mouth that freeze-dried is the way to go next time. Your shoulders will have time to repent at leisure later on.

That’s what happened to us once, way back when I was still young enough and agile enough (not to mention dumb enough) to be willing to ride herd on a horde of feral adolescents in canoes. We taught ‘em how to paddle one year up in the BWCAW and wore ‘em out haulin’ our hefty comissary over all those portages. Then, the next year, when we planned a genteel river meander, everyone was so tired just rememberin’ portagin’ that comissary, that food was a weighty issue on everyone’s mind. Didn’t seem to matter that this’d be in the Ozarks and we’d never hafta carry anything farther than from river’s edge to the top of the gravel bar. We all felt we were entitled to cut ourselves some slack with the cargo tonnage this year. Judicious use of freeze-dried delicacies seemed like the perfect way to lighten our load.

But it turned out that perfection was a pretty slippery and circumscribed commodity here. The dinner bags were perfectly light. But dinner’s brush with perfection ended right there. Thank God for lunch! I mean, peanut-butter-jelly-summer-sausage-n-cheese on crackers may get pretty tedious over the long haul. But it is reliable, familiar food to keep the inner fires stoked. And most folks can even keep on gaggin’ it down day after day without so much as a whimper, discountin’ a few passionate, late-week longings for fried hamburger in any of its many manifestations.

And thank God for adolescent males, among the most efficient and least discerning eating machines on the planet! The adult chaperones and young women on the trip frequently turned up a delicate nose at the odorless, colorless, tasteless goo masquerading as teriyaki chicken or turkey tetrazzini at dinnertime. But these guys made up for it by selflessly sacrificing themselves and takin’ seconds. And even thirds. They chowed down on most anything set before ‘em. Could be puberty temporarily shuts down a guy’s taste buds. I don’t rightly remember. And maybe when you eat that fast, the taste just doesn’t have time to catch up to you. Anyway, they providently kept the potential garbage problem at bay.

But even adolescent appetites have their limits. And the night we had freeze-dried raspberry cobbler for dessert was when our gallant gourmands hit theirs head-on. Nobody’d touch this stuff, not even our ravenous heroes of the high school gridiron. And if you can’t feed it to a (figuratively) starving football tackle, who are you gonna turn to next?

Now, raspberry cobbler sounds pretty inoffensive, doesn’t it? Sounds like a treat, not a terror, right? Doesn’t seem like the sorta food that’d send hungry teenagers runnin’ the other way as if pursued by a giant plate of liver and onions with creamed Brussels sprouts, does it? But that was pretty much the effect this stuff had. There musta been something malevolent about that freeze-dry and reconstitute process that turned our raspberry cobbler far astray from its sweet, natural inclinations. ‘Cause this stuff turned into a potful of evil-looking black glop that seemed about as appetizing as the La Brea Tar Pits. It had a solid, kinda architectural look to it that put the diner more in mind of blacktop road patch than after dinner confections. I’d never heard so many fervent, adolescent variations on "no thank you" in all my life!

Needless to say, we had a small disposal problem after dinner. The raspberry cobbler was all still there, vilely inviolate, in a pot the clean-up crew needed to wash. And they were lookin’ pretty sad about it. But once again, our famished football heroes came to the rescue. I think they had the uneasy feelin’ that they were expected to clean up any leftovers, one way or the other. So they jumped right in to gain the upper hand in deciding the disposal method of choice.

There bein’ a shortage of roads to patch in the immediate vicinity, our volunteer garbage brigade loped gaily off with the latrine shovel to give dessert a decent burial and put it out of our misery. Unfortunately, they misjudged their direction. Instead of trottin’ this stuff off into the woods to its final restin’ place, they just took it down to the end of the gravel bar and tried to put it under there.

But it’s hard to keep a bad dessert down, especially when you’re not takin’ the water table into account. These guys industriously dug themselves a nice, deep hole in the gravel, plopped in the remains of dinner, and shoveled the gravel back on top. But before they could even dust off their hands and saunter back to the campfire, they noticed this tarry, black ooze seepin’ back up at ‘em between the stones, like an avenging ghost rising from the grave. They shoveled more gravel on top. But that raspberry cobbler kept tenaciously tryin’ to rise from the dead. Feverishly, they shoveled yet more gravel on the growing pile. Before they had this stuff firmly interred, they’d built themselves a fine, little pyramid of gravel and ersatz road patch, a monument to bad planning and ecological insensitivity.

Now, I suppose that ill-fated raspberry cobbler could still be haunting that forgotten Ozark hollow, like a mummified pharoah in his tomb. But I doubt it. I imagine the river quickly purged itself of our excesses. And we eventually got over our first encounter with freeze-dried food. It took me a couple of decades to bring myself to try it again. But when I did, I was pleasantly surprised. There’s still never enough of it to go around. But these days, a fella could wish that there was. Freeze-dried food surely ain’t what it used to be. These days, it sometimes even tastes good!

Well, ‘til next time, keep your paddle wet. And keep in touch. Drop me a line c/o Rich Furman and Morgan MacBain, 901 East Geranium Ave., St. Paul MN 55106 or editor@canoe-kayak.org. Let me know if you’ve ever had any culinary disasters come back to haunt you in the backcountry. Remember, Uncle Wally promises to 1) tell the truth so no one would ever believe it anyway and 2) never reveal your true identity to anyone, not even the EPA.