I know this is an old thread but new to me and I'm sure others. Anyway, when I was a young teenager, my best friend and I used to go camping in the foothills. We didn't know what backpacking was. We just wanted to camp by the creek and the only way to get there with our stuff was to walk and carry it. We used to raid Mom's pantry after shopping day and set up our own. We took mostly canned food with a few things like mash potato flakes. We had our meals planned down to the meal because the stuff was heavy. We usually had some leftovers. Then one time just before we were ready to leave, my friends little brother wanted to go and his mother made us take him or not go. We didn't repack and ran low on food the last day. Our parents had dropped us off and were not coming back untill the set time. There were no cell phones and the nearest pay phone or phone for that matter was too far away. We ended up with our last meal being a pot of water with a small amount of potato flakes, 1/2 a can of hominy, a small amount of spam chopped up seasoned by starvation. We were so hungry , we divided the hominy piece by piece.( I didn't care for hominy and haven't ate it for years but I got my share) <img src="/forums/images/graemlins/laugh.gif" alt="" /> It was sort of a tastless, watery potato/spam/hominy soup. The worst thing was it didn't come close to filling us up. To add insult to injury, his brother griped the whole time. (he never wanted to go again <img src="/forums/images/graemlins/cool.gif" alt="" />) That was over forty years ago and the only thing that comes close is freeze dried comercial bp meals or MRE's.