Tips for what to eat for Burning Man newbies

After buying all our crap from a gigantic Walmart

Burning Man lasts seven days and you have to bring all your own food with you, so it took a bit of planning on my part to figure out what to buy. I definitely made some mistakes! This is a guide for people basically who don't really know American supermarkets/brands/foods, and who have only got a day or two to get their shit together.

Some people join camps that  have group set meals, and while we contributed to our camps evening meal ingredients, we didn't eat that often, so largely looked after ourselves.

Planning in advance 
I had all these food ideas coming from the UK that I would be able to buy all this great stuff in Walmart and use it to produce tasty dinners as worked out in my meal plan, which was a good idea in theory but actually failed me pretty hard. As someone who was flying into the country, we really only had one trip to do this all in so it was very intense. I couldn't buy anything in advance.

By the time we were going for our EPIC shop in Walmart, we were all exhausted after spending 3 hours in the Home Depot next door, and I was shocked to realise that either due to my own stupidity, the sheer size of the place or the fact that it just Doesn't Work Like That, I couldn't find half the stuff I wanted. So I had to improvise.

I couldn't find couscous, or jars of curry sauce, for starters. Nor could I locate soft pre-cooked noodles (like those Blue Dragon/Sharwood ones) that weren't ramen that we can get over here. I thought tinned/jarred hot dogs would be a great idea but I couldn't find those either except these tiny cans of kinda reconstituted chicken sausage in brine, and I'm sure there were chickpeas (garbanzo beans) somewhere on a shelf but I just failed to see where.

It may be different somewhere else but it caught me off guard while I was already exhausted (and kind of ill) and struggling to cope with the difference in temperature between Reno and San Francisco. I had to figure out how to do American supermarkets and on very little sleep too, so that was a mistake!

Good types of food to get
(List further down.) The thing I was super glad I bought were tins of spaghetti/ravioli, like spaghetti hoops, and some beef jerky although I didn't buy NEARLY enough. Cashews and almonds were helpful for a handful of quick nutrition, and the bag of peppermint candies I bought was a total lifesaver for sore throats and general refreshment and nice for gifting. The thing I ate the most of was ramen.

The best meal I had out there, more or less, was those tinned sausages, heated up on a trangier stove, in a tortilla wrap with ketchup. Everyone in the camp who was eating with me was practically jumping up and down going OH YEAH OH GOD OH YEAH.  You eat some goddamn funny meals out there - I had a bowl of pretzel bits dressed in sweet chilli sauce while Espen ate a wrap with smashed up tortilla chips and ketchup. UGH.


Food shopping list

For 2012, the following at the very least are on my list, and probably more in the future.  I daresay I'd have better meal plans if I wasn't flying in but I am so it has to be the bare survival minimums really! I hate tuna by the way but tuna on crackers is apparently very decent out there.

- Bagels
- Small raisin boxes
- Wraps
- Tins of spaghetti
- Pepperoni sticks - they have these things called Slim Jims which are basically Pepperamis, which I ate a tonne of.
- Chocolate (the chocolate melted and i discovered it liquidy and squishy two days later so I stuck it in the cooler and forgot about it only to discover this icy-reformed chocolate bar two days later and I almost wept because it was so good. that was a great idea)
- Nuts
- Ramen
- Peppermints
- Beef jerky
- More tinned sausage/hot dogs in brine (if I can find it)
- Pretzels
- Granola bars/cereal bars
- Some fruit (which can go right in the cooler.)

Drinks

- Water-flavouring sachets (so nice when you've been drinking plain warm water all day).
- Ginger ale/Mountain dew/Lemon and lime drink - something fizzy I found very refreshing.
- More isotonic drinks - Powerade or Gatorade are like Lucozade and while they taste pretty disgusting imo they are very helpful given how much sweating you'll do without realising. Plus you can stick some gin in them and it's a pretty decent cocktail haha.
- Limes and lemons to freshen up my water bottle.

Coolers
I've never really used a cooler before! I'm 25 and I live in the city and we don't have this epically hot summers where you have to take a cooler to the park, not properly. Before we got out there we spent a lot of time wondering what the hell we were going to do with a cooler and in the end, we bought non-perishable food and kept mostly just drinks in the cooler which turned out to work just fine once it was filled with a few blocks of ice from Artica camp.
In my view, when you're already having to struggle to get out there, at least as a newbie, trying to make sure food that HAS to be kept cold survives is a bit too much hassle.
We bought a normal cooler from a Home Depot for about $30 and on the day after we arrived, we picked up some ice for it. The ice lasted for AGES and we also used the cooler as a little seat :3. Nothing will freeze in it so buying ice-pops was a stupid move of ours but it was amazing having cold beer.


Bad types of food to get
Anything that requires a lot of effort, or too much of anything. We had way too many nuts, ramen and pretzels by the end of the week which we had to take out with us. Anything that uses a lot of water to cook that you have to throw away is a bad idea (pasta and rice). Anything that produces a lot of waste, sachets, boxes etc.
Otter pops/ice pops will not freeze in a normal cooler so that was a waste. Everything that couldn't be eaten once melted had to be binned. Half the stuff goddamn melted on its way to the desert so bear in mind you might be sitting in a hot car for 5 hours with it all, unless you're clever and pick up ice and a cooler in advance which we weren't! (That's a good tip.) Fredrik brought a palette of eggs almost half of which smashed en route, which was a bit predictable really.



Make sure you eat, even if you don't feel like it
Don't do what I did and get sick of eating, or not bothering to make the effort to eat. The hot temperature really zaps your appetite, and by night time you feel ravenous. On Wednesday and again on Sunday I got seriously weak and dizzy. After my boyfriend brought me some ramen, I felt ten times better.