Campfire Food Gets a Makeover

In “Wild,” the upcoming film based on the memoir by Cheryl Strayed, Reese Witherspoon plays a woman on a solo mission to hike 1,100 miles of the West Coast’s Pacific Crest Trail. The movie, which hits the silver screen December 5, is about determination, emotional struggles, and… not eating particularly well.

"So we’re talking about dehydrated food… Power Bars and Cliff bars and, you know, Snickers candy bars and… dried fruit," Strayed told NPR’s Diane Rehm back in 2012. She’d mail boxes of food to post offices along the trail, then pick them up as she went along. "And then if there was a store along the way, you know, you would just be ecstatic, and you would buy everything you could."

At the time, Strayed didn’t have access to products such as Good To-Go, a new line of gourmet just-add-water meals that went on sale online and in select stores this April. Its creator, Jennifer Scism, a chef and former co-owner of contemporary American restaurant Annisa in New York City, kickstartedthe brand not long after she began hiking with her (very outdoorsy) husband.

Photo credit: Good To-Go

"We were going for a week in the Adirondacks, and my husband and I decided to go lighter on our packs,” Scism told us. “We’re those crazy people who cut the ends of our toothbrushes [to save space], and food was the last crux.” But for Scism, sub-par trail fare was not an option.

"There are absolutely no preservatives or additives—it’s just real food," Scism told us, explaining that every dish is made like normal and then dehydrated using a dehydrator. "Everything that I do comes from my cooking background. It’s probably more costly than what the competitors make out there, but the outcome is a much better product."

Sure, you could dry some food out in your oven and toss it in your pack. But you could also pick up Good To-Go’s Thai curry ($6.75 for one serving), which one reviewer declares tastes “just as good, if not better, than a lot of curries I’ve had.” It also recently won Backpacker Magazine’s prestigious Editor’s Choice Snow Award.

So go forth, and be wild.

Are you a camper? What is your grub of choice on the trail? Let us know in the comments or Tweet to us at @YahooFood.

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