by Son of a Beach » Thu 22 May, 2008 1:21 pm
I'll be interested in hearing others' replies to this as well.
For myself, for most food I remove any unessential packaging and put it in zip-lock bags. This is especially suitable for powders, or foods made up of many small pieces (eg, oats, tea leaves, home dried vegetables, home made jerky). One advantage of this is that with all these bags in together, they will mould together to fit the space available between them all.
I sometimes use hard plastic containers (eg, tupperware) for crushable items, such as cracker biscuits, or weet-bix (which I occasionally take), and also for foods that would be difficult to get out of plastic bags (eg, butter).
Of course some foods don't need any repackaging at all (eg, most chocolate, commercially freeze-dried meals).
Then all food goes into one large strong calico bag to keep it all together, and in case anything leaks (I don't double-bag everything, as I think this is a waste of bags and a plastic burden on land-fill later).
For long extended walks where I have several crushable items, I'll pack them together into a rather large plastic container (about 30x20x10cm?), which is then packed separately from the calico bag (and the container's lid ends up making a great flat surface for spreading butter, etc, onto mountain bread, ryvita, etc). Any free space in this large container gets filled up with non-crushable items (eg, my zip-lock bags) to prevent the crushables moving around and breaking. As as the walk goes on, and the crushables are gradually consumed, more of the non-crushables are added to the large containter, to prevent what's left from shaking about and breaking (and to take up less space in the rest of my pack!).