Vegan Wall Food
Hey Steph,
Since I can tell you’re a fellow vegan and climber, I’m hoping you can help. What are some recommendations for big wall vegan food? I’m doing my first multi-day climb and am hoping to pack more than just a bunch of peanut butter jelly sandwiches and granola bars. Thanks!
~Michele
Hi Michele, I hope you will have fun–you didn’t say what wall you are heading up on! I love my food bag when I pack for a long route, because it’s always very light. There is one problem, though, which is that your partner is guaranteed to want your food, even though you packed it especially for your vegan eating needs. So you have to bring extra.
Most likely your non-vegan partner will have the standard kit of canned beef stew, tuna, cheese, tortillas, bagels, candy bars and jerky, none of which you will eat, but if you don’t give them your comparatively tiny amount of food to share, they will definitely get all upset. Believe me. This is one of the many ways humans are exactly like dogs….everyone else’s food must always be better! So trust me, just pack some extra. It will still weigh half as much as a non-vegan food cache.
I always bring a small stove, because I must have coffee, and I like bringing dehydrated food. I use an MSR pocketrocket, with the titanium teakettle. One cartridge is plenty for a few days, and this is a very light set-up, which allows you to save a lot of weight on food (rather than bringing cans, like a lot of people do to eat them cold, and then still have to haul the empty cans). And, um, I, um, also bring a very very small stovetop espresso maker. Very small. But I’m a little weird….. It really does not weigh much at all, and there will be no climbing without coffee, so it’s actually a necessity, like for example, the rope.
For food, I always bring:
powdered soymilk (a brand that comes in a tall can, called “Better Than Milk” this kind is great and does not clump like the kind from bulk bins–be careful, the vanilla flavor has almost exactly the same label as the plain flavor, which is highly tricky)
muesli
coffee
Mojo mixed nuts bars
Clif bloks (usually the Margarita kind because they are a little salty, and black cherry for caffeine)
very very small tupperware tub full of almond butter, crunchy, to eat with Mojo bars or crackers
nuts and/or dried mangos and apples
rice noodle Ramens
instant lentil soups
crackers
nutritional yeast and red pepper flakes
almond cheese
This all packs very light, and is pretty much what I bring no matter what I am doing.
I hope you have a great time!
🙂 Steph
Good info, Steph. Can’t wait for the posts where you describe what you bring for lunch and dinner.
Sorry.
Couldn’t resist.
Just don’t be trying to eat my lunch Dave! 🙂
I will second the dried mangoes, I recently started drying them for my crag trips. I think they taste even better dried, it brings out the sugars.
I also make my own bars in my food dehydrator and bring them. I would like to know where you get crunchy almond butter though. I’ve never seen it, but I make my own now anyway, I could always experiment with making mine chunky.
Damn, I was looking for this forever! Smoked tofu is most certainly the best wall food you could find, especially for winter or plain cold weather. I have also experimented with drying out veggie-burgers (the high gluten kind) and taking them with me, but that did not go over so well.