Re: [Philmont]: stripping meals

If you want to order PhilFood for shakedown practice purposes, best do
so very quickly (it may already be too late, but I don't know for sure).
  Once they switch over to making THIS year's food, they don't have time
to fill orders anymore.

If anyone knows if they are still filling orders, I'm sure the list
would like to know.

Troop 6 Scoutmaster wrote:
> I've watched with interest over the last week or so the thread on meal
> stripping. As Tom says, you should find what works for you; ultimately
> thats all that matters. To that end I'd suggest that you actually order
> PhilFood from the Philmont commissary to use during your shake downs so that
> you can experience, first hand, the reality of what you will be dealing
> with. I was a first time advisor in '04 and had done enough research (or so
> I thought) that meal stripping, or more accurately consolidation of like
> sized packages (cracker boxes, ham cans ... etc) and trash elimination
> (outer wrappers) seemed like a good idea. Our crew discussed it during a
> shakedown weekend where we had PhilFood and thought it was a good idea.
> When we picked up our first set of meals at basecamp, four days worth, it
> became instantly obvious to us that tearing down 72 meal packets would not
> be an easy task. Add to this the look of disbelief from our Ranger. We
> decided to try it his way. To help put things in perspective I'll explain
> .. Philfood is unique, it is a mix of off the shelf consumer products and
> commercial backpacking food packed in two person packets. There are two of
> each of the items that each person gets and one of each item they are to
> share. There isn't a complete description of each meal packet's contents
> although there is a basic description in the guidebook to adventure. The
> outer package proves useful as a trash container and as a clean place to
> arrange all the individual dinner packets. Also, every time you stop for
> program or at a campsite, the food, all of it, goes up in a bear bag,
> leaving it in the outer packaging simplified this task. We also adopted the
> protocol whereby meal buddies would each take the breakfast and lunch for
> that day when we packed up in the morning (we made a habit of eating
> breakfast 1hr or more out of the campsite) and that the cooks for each day
> carried all of the suppers (no trouble rounding up dinner); the rest was
> distributed until we each had our fair share, based on package count. We
> also ate just about everything (except the green beans) we got and used
> drop/take boxes accordingly. My long winded point being that in retrospect
> I can't see how meal stripping would have worked for *US*, breaking the
> packages up would have most certainly resulted in chaos. But to Tom's
> point, each crew must find their own way, what works for them, there is no
> right answer.
>
> Jim Thompson
> 74, 04 and 06
>

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Received on Wed Jan 19 05:38:23 2005