Gene Hikes the Appalachian Trail

Tag: food

  • Kryptonite Foods

    I am hoping to lose some weight as a side benefit of this thru-hike training. However, there are a few items out there that are doing their level best to prevent that from happening. I’m not talking about the two-foot tall slices from Cheesecake Factory or the fudge variety pack from Buc-ee’s. Those are obviously bad for you. I’m talking about things I buy with the intention of not overdoing it, but then look down 20 minutes later and the entire bag / tub / carton is empty. Also foods that seem okay to enjoy in moderation but are really silent killers. Like how they told us cigarettes were back in the 1980s. I will take this opportunity to shout out the snacks and guilty pleasures that make my life taste so good and my man boobs so soft and jiggly.

    DR PEPPER & CREAM SODA

    When these flavored Dr Pepper sodas first came out I openly scoffed and called it another unnecessary cash grab. I bought a bottle at a nearby 7-11, more because there wasn’t anything else I wanted than because I actually wanted one. Once I had my first sip though, I knew I was hooked for life.

    Something about the the flavor combo of Dr Pepper with cream soda is exactly what my taste buds crave. It also might be the fact that there are 39 grams of sugar in every 12 ounce can. At 150 calories each, these things are literally devastating to any diet. I can blow through 600-900 calories in a half hour just from these things. I try to never buy the 12 packs because I consume them too quickly.

    HEB MEXICAN STREET CORN TORTILLA CHIPS

    First of all, yes I am aware that they changed the packaging on these recently. But this is the packaging they had when I fell in love so I’ll always represent the O.G. version. Since this is a local Texas brand, most of you will never get to taste these. Trust me when I say the secret is that they taste exactly like street corn. I first had elote in 2014 while I was living in Las Vegas and immediately felt like I had wasted the first 38 years of my life.

    One serving of these chips has 170mg of sodium, which is 7% of the recommended daily allowance. This doesn’t sound too bad until you realize that one serving is only ten chips. No one eats ten chips and stops, especially when they taste like this. The entire bag is 70% of your recommended sodium and 110% of your recommended fat intake. And HEB loves to do coupons to encourage buying two or more bags at a time. I am highly susceptible to encouragement.

    BROWN COW MAPLE VANILLA YOGURT

    If you have never eaten Brown Cow yogurt, I feel genuinely bad for you. Please go buy some at your local supermarket and then come back and finish reading this. I’ll wait.

    That was great wasn’t it? The cream on top is so gooey and delicious and sweet. I like to mix it in with the rest of the yogurt, but eating it separately is totally allowed. Okay, now I need a minute to go have one myself.

    The hidden danger of this yogurt is added sugar. Total sugar is 16 grams, with added sugars accounting for 10 of those grams. This represents 20% of what scientists say you should have. But what do scientists know? Actually, they know pretty much everything about the natural world.

    SUBWAY TUNA SALAD FOOT-LONG

    People love to hate on Subway nowadays because the foot-long subs don’t cost $5 the way they used to 25 years ago. As though it is okay for every other consumable to increase in price, but not for subs with catchy jingles.

    I still go to Subway fairly frequently, and when I do I almost always get the tuna salad sub. I make tuna salad at home, but when I do I substitute cottage cheese instead of most of the mayo. Subway doesn’t substitute anything. It is chock full of mayo and umami goodness. Then you can have the sandwich artist add globs of additional mayo right before they close it up.

    The six inch tuna salad sub has 570 calories and 33 grams of fat. Mayo by itself adds 100 calories and 11 more grams of fat. This is all very depressing information.

    TATE’S BAKE SHOP CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES

    These are the best cookies you can buy at every single Ross Dress For Less or Burlington Coat Factory. Or Marshalls. As a group, those and other similar places are called “off-price retailers”. I have no idea why you can find these cookies at those places, but I’m glad because I frequent off-price retailers often when I need new underwear or outerwear.

    It must be the high fat content that makes these so good. Two cookies contain 23% of the recommended daily allowance (RDA) of saturated fat. Good thing an entire bag has only fourteen cookies, I guess. Of course, one big selling point on these things is that they are from tony Southampton, New York. So eating just one gets me 100% of my RDA of smug.

    EGG NOG

    Saving the most decadent for last. This is the only kryptonite food that doesn’t have a specific brand. That’s because I am equally vulnerable to all brands of egg nog. Every year I patiently wait until just before Thanksgiving and then begin my ritual of buying at least one quart of egg nog every Saturday morning. I rush home and then have one pint. Then I sit at home trying to stop thinking about the fact that a whole ‘nother pint of creamy, delicious egg nog is sitting right there in my fridge begging me to drink it. Usually by Saturday evening that second pint is also gone. I just thank my lucky stars that I never see egg nog sold in gallons.

    Last year Dairy Queen had a holiday nog shake for the holidays. I was there so many times they started yelling out my name when I walked in like Norm from Cheers.

    Looking at nutritional labels on egg nog is enough to make you cry. One serving has around 200 calories, which is a fuckload for a beverage. But a serving is one half of one cup. For those of you who only use metric, that means one pint (~475 mL) of the stuff is roughly 800 calories. One measly pint. I think that is all the information you need to be able to figure out whether or not I have trouble keeping weight off during the holidays.

  • 2 Churning 2 Burning

    I finally decided to try the viral running trend again. You know, the one where you run with a bag of cream and churn it into butter. Last time it did not work out very well at all. As promised, this time I made a few changes based on my previous result.

    First, and most importantly, I got heavy cream that was free from preservatives and was low temp pasteurized instead of ultra-pasteurized. This was the most significant and expensive change I made. I bought this boutique stuff called Mill King Heavy Whipping Cream from Central Market. It cost an angina inducing $6.79 for one pint. That comes out to $54.32 per gallon.

    And what exactly is all that money I’m spending for? The only ingredient in this stuff is literally just cow’s cream.

    Last time, I got burned by preservatives like polysorbate 80. This stuff has none of that at all. It doesn’t make sense that not adding things to a product makes it cost so much more. For $50 a gallon I’d expect this to contain Love Potion No. 9, Invigaron, and Compound V.

    This is like when you go to the modern gym with rows of treadmills and ellipticals everywhere and membership is $10 a month. Then you see another place that looks like some rando’s garage with rusty dumbbells in a corner and everything looks like it smells like ball sweat, and the price is $75 a week.

    In addition to the change of cream I made lots of other changes. As you can tell from the amount of sweat on the bottle in the pics above, I left the cream out for about an hour to get close to room temp before heading out. I also ran 6.5 miles instead of 6 although my route was still entirely sidewalks and improved roads. I also added about 1/8 tsp of salt to the cream. Same as last time, I poured the cream into a double bag and put the bag in my hydration carrier and took off.

    When I got back I knew instantly that I had a different result than before. Last time there was no real separation but this time there was a definite fatty residue all over the bag with a liquid phase all around it. A picture of the inside of the bag will show you what I mean.

    I stuck a finger in there and scooped some up and it definitely tasted like butter. This means I got farther than I got last time. The next step from here is to scoop out your butter and dunk it in ice cold water. This helps wash out any buttermilk that is trapped in your butter (which can make it go bad faster). You put the butter into a giant bowl of ice water and knead it a little so the butter clumps together and everything that isn’t butter rinses out.

    A picture of this would show you what I mean. If I had one. Let me say that scooping freshly made room temperature butter from a ziploc bag into a bowl of ice water is one of the messiest things I’ve ever done in my life. I instantly wound up with butter all over my forearms and the kitchen counter and everything. And warm butter does not simply wash off your hands. It just smears around all over the place. The last thing I was going to do was grab my phone to take a picture of this horrible mess. If you ever try making your own butter, make sure you have at least two sets of hands to help with this step and the inevitable clean-up.

    Eventually, after many hand washes and towelings off, I got the butter fully rinsed. I formed it into a ball and placed it onto a saucer.

    Eyeballing it, this made a total of about 3 or 4 ounces of butter. The only thing left was the taste test. A couple dabs on some toast and washed down with a Powerade.

    OK, not to sound immodest or anything but it tasted great. It tasted like you imagine the homemade butter you will one day make with your own two hands will taste. Rich, creamery butter taste and mouthfeel.

    Finally, the ultimate question to answer: was this whole thing worth it? Fuck no! Between the two tries I spent $9.75 on cream, ran 12.5 miles, and completely turfed my kitchen. And for what? Four ounces of butter? What a fucking joke. I guess I have the memes and the friends I met along the way, but the juice is not worth the squeeze as they say. I hope the next viral trend involves sitting on the couch reading sci-fi short stories.

  • High Rollin

    So I’m going to do a change of pace here and post something that has nothing to do with hiking or fitness or anything of the sort. It’s allowed; I can do that. I can talk about anything I want because this is my fucking blog. I can also swear casually.

    This past Saturday I went to my first MLS game, Austin FC versus the Houston Dynamo. I had never been to a game here in Austin despite the team existing since 2021 largely for two reasons. One, I feel like MLS is equivalent to third-tier European football, which is something I have never paid to watch either. Two, I have a long-standing, entirely one-sided feud with Austin FC’s principal owner Anthony Precourt.

    Precourt is the sort of billionaire asshole sports owner (BASO) that did everything he could to ruin the Columbus MLS franchise before finally getting an expansion team in Austin. Precourt also happens to be one of those private equity dudes who seems incapable of earning money except by sucking all of the joy out of all of the small things that little people like me enjoy.

    All of that said, if the Austin MLS team was an MLB or NFL team instead I’d happily support them. The sad truth is that every BASO is a douchebag. It’s just that if you are passionate enough about the team they own you’ll look the other way until they do something so bad even their fellow BASOs cannot justify it. Jerry Richardson was the founding owner of my beloved Carolina Panthers. He was a douchebag, the sort of douchebag who puts a giant statue of himself in front of the team’s stadium. That alone was not a fireable offense as a BASO. What was fireable was being a racist, sexist piece of shit.

    Who am I kidding? That alone is not enough. The problem is that Richardson was so racist and sexist that there had to be an investigation. The results of which were so bad they made him sell the team. That is how you get fired as a BASO. Donald Sterling was a known shit sandwich but didn’t get booted from the NBA until they caught him on tape being a racist cocksucker. As long as it wasn’t on tape there was enough plausible deniability to look the other way. Once everything became public record he became expendable. See also, Daniel Snyder.

    Boston Bruins owner Jeremy Jacobs has been a mean-spirited skinflint and outright spiteful to the very fans that feed his bottom line for as long as he has run the team, but he is still a proud BASO. The Bruins are my NHL team of choice because I am a hypocrite and follow Boston despite Jacobs while loathing Austin FC because of Precourt.

    Well anyway this post is not about why every BASO is a fundamentally bad person, it is about my trip to the game. I got a free ticket from a friend who has seats in an unlimited food and drinks section at picturesque Q2 Stadium. He has two season tickets to this area. He had one free ticket because someone else wasn’t able to go. Why? Don’t know, don’t care.

    Now I’ve known this guy since college and I knew he was doing well financially, but I did not know he was doing WELL, if you know what I mean. After graduation he moved to Austin to attend grad school at UT. He was living the life of a poor college student during this time.

    I remember when the Chicago Whie Sox (my team; don’t get me started on Jerry Reinsdorf’s qualifications as a BASO) faced the Houston Astros (his team; he grew up in Houston) in the 2005 World Series we made a friendly wager. I wanted to do $50 but he said that was too rich for him so we did $20 instead. Chicago swept that World Series and I used the $20 to buy a Pale Hose cap with the World Series logo. This was back when $20 could buy a nice fitted baseball cap that now costs about $45 and is sewn together by the lowest bidder that Fanatics can find. I still own that cap even though the bill is literally disintegrating. I swore I’d wear it until we make another World Series and I can replace it. Hopefully Murakami and Montgomery and the boys punch way above their weight soon.

    The point, though, is that he couldn’t put $50 on his favorite team twenty years ago and now he is tossing fistfuls of cash at cushy seats in a swanky stadium. He also lives in a nice house in a gated community in West Austin with an 80″ television. I’m happy for him, and he is now my “rich friend”.

    So we get to the stadium ninety minutes before kickoff because that is when the gates open. Outside they are giving away free cans of Dr Pepper Creamy Coconut, which tastes just like a liquid Mounds bar. First thing we do once we get inside is head for the unlimited food area. I had some street tacos with sumac onions and tahini sauce. Then I got a Karbach Love Street to wash it all down.

    Later on, still before kickoff, I had a smash patty burger with fries, and a serving of pita chips with a whipped feta dip.

    Come kickoff we head down to the seats which are so close to the pitch I am legitimately concerned that I may get hit by an errant free kick. We get to those seats while both two-fisting beers that we sucked down until halftime.

    one fistful of beer

    Second half included more food and beers and a piece of orange olive oil cake. I’d never heard of olive oil cake before that night but I wish I had because it tasted the same way everything else did. Awesomely awesome.

    Oh yeah, and the team actually won 2-0. And they shot like a million fireworks off. And then I went back to my decidedly non-glamorous life where the food and drink is nether “unlimited” nor “delicious” nor even “passably mediocre”. But for one night I got to live like a damn hell ass king thanks to my rich friend. I have not been converted into a fan of Austin FC or Anthony Precourt just yet, but enough more nights like Saturday may change that.

  • Worst Fear: Alpha-gal Syndrome

    The idea of spending five months walking with a heavy pack on, sleeping outside in all types of weather, and foregoing the comforts of home can sound scary. It definitely does scare me on occasion when I think about it. But, like, it scares me in a good way. Like, an I believe this will be challenging but I can handle it, kind of way. There are other things about the trail that scare me in a different way.

    I am a very risk averse person by nature. I’ve never been on a roller coaster, I’ve never scuba dived. I’ve only been outside the continental United States twice (once to Montreal and once to Puerto Rico). The reason I never take risks is because I always play out the absolute worst thing that can possibly happen over and over in my head until I’m convinced it will. Do I want to stand on the edge of this moderately high building? No, because the exact second I decide to stand there I will get hit by a minor vortex that lifts me over the edge and drops me onto a giant pile of broken concrete and rusty safety razors and horse dung. The very fact that nothing like this has ever happened to me just reinforces the idea that my abundance of caution is the reason why.

    I have several very specific fears about things that may happen to me on the Appalachian Trail. They range from the plausible to the irrationally unlikely. But rest assured that wherever on that continuum they lie, I remain equally concerned about them. Perhaps writing them out here in my blog will help to allay my fears. For my first specific fear I have something that is very real and even likely to occur. Fortunately, it is also easily preventable with care and discipline.

    My first fear (that is first chronologically, not first in terms of the amount of heebie-jeebies it gives me) is alpha-gal syndrome. Alpha-gal syndrome is an allergic disease caused by a tick bite. Being bitten causes you to develop an allergic reaction to galactose-α-1,3-galactose (also known as alpha-gal). That carbohydrate is found in the meat of most mammals, which means once you get it you will no longer be able to eat beef, pork, or most other meat. Alpha-gal is not found in humans, so Soylent Green would still be okay to eat. In the worst cases, people with the syndrome are not able to consume dairy like milk or yogurt either.

    The idea of an allergic reaction to alpha-gal is not unknown. What is scary is the idea of becoming allergic to the molecule after you eat it and it circulates in the bloodstream. Alpha-gal is the main reason why pig organs are rejected during transplantation into people. Our antibodies attack the carbohydrate and cause the organs to fail. Fortunately, scientists are engineering xenotransplants which lack that molecule.

    Unfortunately, that does not matter with alpha-gal syndrome. When the tick bites you it can take up to several months to develop the reaction. The exact mechanism is not clear. The same tick could bite two people and one can get the syndrome and the other won’t. Once you have it, a few hours after you eat red meat the allergic reaction begins. No more steak or ice cream or hot dogs, for the rest of your life.

    Which specific ticks can cause this? Way too many. Lone star tick, blacklegged tick, and western blacklegged tick are all known or suspected to cause it. Where is the lone star tick located? Why, the eastern United States of course. Isn’t that where the Appalachian Trail is? No shit. When are they most active? April to September. Well, fuck my life.

    public enemy number one

    As horrific as this is, it can be easily prevented. Permethrin is a miracle compound. Our Army uniforms were impregnated with it and I can proudly say I never got a tick bite despite sleeping on exposed ground many, many times across the southeastern United States. It is also critical to frequently check yourself and each other for ticks when you have a chance. They like to hide in your underarms and between your legs, just like many perverts you encounter.

    There are not many things worse than getting alpha-gal syndrome as far as I’m concerned. As scary as it is, practicing good hygiene and insect prevention is the key to making sure it does not happen to me. There are more than a few other scenarios I will go over in the coming months that are in some ways even more scary than this. I can’t wait to tell you all about them.