"An old standard? what do you mean? Sorry if this sounds ignorant....I am just curious."

Franco's reply is, as usual, a good one. I just meant, however, that it's a very common way to get to move closer to the goal of "calorically dense" food, i.e., as the thread says, a high ratio of calories per unit weight of food.

Among long distance trail (thru-) hikers, olive oil is perhaps the most widely used approach --- because it's not too hard to obtain (in the AT this year I even found 8-oz mini-bottles of olive oil in a couple of gas station mini-marts), it's calorically dense, and when your body is burning lots and lots of calories per day it's particularly tasty to add to any cooked meal. I typically add about an ounce (fluid or weight, take your pick) to any dinner meal, including a Mt. House (a 2-person Mt. House is a small to moderate sized dinner for a thru-hiker ...).

Okay, so an aside that I was expecting someone would trot out in this thread (seems to come up every time on this topic): chocolate and nuts are both very calorically dense, so at one point in a discussion of how to most efficiently fill a bear can, one wag suggested that pouring in a mix of macadamia nuts in melted chocolate to fill the can would be most efficient --- and that if a person got sick of eating that mix, they could trade for other food along the way. Assuming, of course, that you could manage to chip chunks out of the hardened mix!
_________________________
Brian Lewis
http://postholer.com/brianle