After reading about blue barrels and other food barrel substitutes I was wondering how you store the food waste trash generated on a trip. Do you use the same methods of storing your food at campsites, ie away from camp hanging in a container or in a trash bag in the campsite or some other method? I would think food waste trash would attract more critters than food that is sealed prior to being cooked.
To some degree it depends on how and what you’re eating, and what kind of “food waste” remains.
I tend to eat oatmeal or grits, fortified with dried fruit or etc, for breakfast. I eat every morsel, so there isn’t much food waste remaining. I am Scots-frugal, dump a little hot water in the oatmeal cup and shallow the last flakey dregs. Yummy.
I do keep a separate Zip-lock “burn bag” and use any paper packaging as starter in the next fire. Coffee is Via, so there are no grounds, just slender foil packets in the garbage bag.
After breakfast I lick the spoon clean, rinse out the mug and bowl, and that “cook wear” goes back in the barrel along with the stove.. If “real” cooking is involved I am convinced that the pots and pans used for anything more than boiling water present a critter odor attractant no matter how well scrubbed. I have no olfactory sense, but I can smell bacon on that cast iron skillet.
Stove odors too if you are a messy cook; we haven’t used our 2-burner Coleman’s for years, but I could probably make a meal of the splatter scrapings. An unopened freeze dry meal or can of New Spring Potatoes has zero attractant odor compared with some tasty crust left on a pot lid or spattered around a stove.
Lunch is typically a sandwich and snack stuff, so again no food waste leftover. Dinner is most often freeze dry or some easy noodle dish. The biggest food odor attractant there is the leftover freeze dry pouch; I usually only rehydrate half of a commercial freeze dry meal at a time, put the other half in a baggie and eat it the next evening.
I use a Reflectix cozie rehydrating meal pouches and prefer that to using a pot, so I rinse out freeze dry pouch and put it back in the barrel for reuse the second night.
I don’t burn plastic or foils, so I eventually rinse the pouch out again it goes into the garbage bag; I expect even rinsed those pouches are still an odor attractant.
I’ll sometimes bring canned food (the Irish in me loves a can of New Spring Potatoes, easy-peezy heated over the fire and forked piping hot directly from the can), especially on trips where I am packing potable water anyway. That’s a great, filling, sharable appetizer with the tater water used later in the half-ration of a rehydrated meal for some tuber flavoring. The empty cans get rinsed, crushed and go into the garbage bag. Even scoured in the fire there is probably still some residual food odor there as well.
The garbage bag, especially if “free” of food odors early on, is hung near camp, more often in bear-fee areas where the bigger concern is squirrels, chipmunks and raccoons. That campsite potential for midnight Rodentia visits might not be restful practice if tripping with a dog, or if you freak out every time you hear a raccoon chattering in traverse rope frustration.
I prefer to store food, stove and cook wear in a blue barrel or other hard side container, and I don’t hang usually hang those. On a longer trip I may have both the 30L barrel and a small 10L plastic wide-neck drum. If space necessitates no-odor excess sealed meals or cans may start off in a small dry bag instead of a 3[SUP]rd[/SUP] hard side container.
But, once all the food fits in the barrel, the trash bag goes in the emptied drum. It’s just easier, less messy and far more critter-proof.
I do like the incremental sizing of Cur-tec wide mouth drums. On shorter trips I can get away with two of the 10L versions instead of a 30L barrel, and garbage vessel the second one when emptied.
They also fit better than the 30L barrel in a decked boat. And they fit better in
any boat than a \_/ pail shape. The 10L (2.6 gallon drum (_) somehow
appears smaller than a 3 gallon \_/ pail; it’s just a better shape for packing grub inside container and transports/stores more efficiently.
https://www.curtec.com/en/products/drums/wide-neck-drums
(For Ken-in-a-Kayak trips the 3.6L/1 gallon versions
might fit in a kayak hatch; check the measurements.
https://www.curtec.com/en/products/drums/wide-neck-drums/detail/wide-neck-drum-3-litres
If anyone ever sees those Cur-tec wide neck drums, in any size, grab them; they are awesome and very water tight.
In all honesty my biggest trash item is crushed empty beer cans. I probably should rinse them out just to eliminate the barroom stank and inevitable bag drippage that develops over time. Maybe next time.
I have never put the garbage bag in the 30L or 60L barrel, probably because I have yet to produce 30L of trash and empties, and condense other non-garbage things into in the barrel when space is available. But I have no problem putting that leaky, skanky bag in the food-emptied 10L drum as soon as it is available. At some take outs I don’t really want to deal with transporting a leakyskanky trash bag for 100 miles ‘til I find a dumpster, not back in my travelling bed and sure as hell not up front with me.
I scrub out the drum after a dumpster visit, and bleach it after I get home; don’t bleach the rubber gasket in the lid. As a gross aside the hardest smell to get rid of any plastic container is the weird and distinctive odor of crap-filled Wagbags.
How much “food waste” or trash you produce is up to you. One multi-week trip with a UL practicioner and trash abhorring companion stands to mind. After 3 weeks I had a yard waste sized bag of trash and empties, including some not-my stuff I had picked up along the way. The totality of his trash (and I know he burns nothing) fit easily in a 2 gallon Zip-lock bag.
I do agree that even in the cleanest practices the “garage bag” is a bigger issue than food/stove/cook wear storage when using hard side containers.
starters.
