The Happy Camper: Menu Planning 101

By: Kevin Callan

Rating: ****

    I had decided to read this article because menu planning had been mentioned in class. Since I don’t have very much cooking experience, I thought that it would be helpful to me while planning a menu for the upcoming hiking trip.

    This article is about a man, named Kevin Callan, who was approached to teach a wilderness class that didn’t know how to properly nourish themselves when camping. When Kevin heard about this, he was shocked and he decided to write an article about what kinds of foods to bring when you are going on a camping trip and how to prepare them. He stated that many of the foods, if not most, should come from a bulk food store because they are all easy to find there and they are also inexpensive. Some of the foods that he wrote about where: lentils, rice, pasta (specifically whole grain and vegetable), beans and quinoa. There were many others as well. The article also included a twenty minute video that demonstrated what types of foods Callan’s students made in their final project after learning from him.

    I think that this article will help me plan the menus for the hiking trip and it will be a good reference for any other time that I go camping. It might also aid me in coming up with ideas for school lunches. Reading this has made me really reflect on what I eat and how there are so many more healthy things out there that I could be trying. There was a lot of new information in this article but there was also a lot of information that I already knew. I am definitely going to try to apply the information I’ve learned from this article to my work in class for Outdoor Ed as well as the other aspects of my life.   

Callan, Kevin. “The Happy Camper: Menu Planning 101” Explore Magazine. N.p., 18 Nov. 2013. Web. 3 Sept. 2014. <http://www.explore-mag.com/the-happy-camper-menu-planning-101>.