The Primal Parent

What to Eat Camping and How to Have a Primal Vacation

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Our tent on the beach at Lake Powell

I love vacationing on the beach. I love swimming in deep water and laying like a lizard on the sand. I love scuba diving in the Caribbean and practicing my Spanish in South America, but the thing I hate about that kind of vacation these days is figuring out what to eat and avoiding high carb ehtnic foods.

Last year my Colombian boyfriend, Julian, took me back to his country to meet his family and see his home. Traveling was awesome, his family was great but it wasn’t long before I was battling extreme physical and mental discomfort. I am incredibly allergic to the banana family and plantains are in everything. I can’t tolerate fruit sugar and fruit is a staple over there. I can’t eat onions or cilantro. I don’t eat grains. I don’t eat fried foods. I was a weirdo in a country where people haven’t even heard of food allergies and where they believe that being fat is attractive and mature. They have absolutely no idea that the same thing which makes them fat also degrades their health.

I tried at first to pick the starches out of the soups and just eat the meat and broth but eventually all the picking was impolite, plus I was getting freakin hungry! After a while I resigned myself to eating like a Colombian and, while it was tasty, I felt terrible for five weeks. (Next time we go we will rent an apartment and cook for ourselves. We did this when we traveled to Santa Marta and it was the best I felt on the whole trip.)

This summer vacation was to be on my terms.

What is the one thing that would be paleo and totally within my control, ooh ha ha? Camping! Julian hasn’t seen much of the US yet and Evelyn is so girly she could use a little toughening up, so off to the national parks we went!

We hit Arches, Canyonlands, Lake Powell, Grand Canyon, and Mesa Verde. Here are a few pictures. You can find more on my facebook page.

The Colorado River downstream from Lake Powell

Self portrait at the Utah Arch

Evelyn and me having a moment of silence at the Grand Canyon (this was one of her Junior Ranger exercises)

Little hands peeking through a window at Mesa Verde

The Needles district at the Canyonlands

Packing for a Primal Camping Trip

We kept our packing simple with sleeping bags, a tent, toiletries, clothes, and extra shoes. We didn’t bring chairs, choosing instead to sit on rocks and logs. At the last minute I packed a box of toys which Evelyn never played with at all, preferring plants, rocks, and dirt to toys. That’s it, that and a couple of huge coolers stocked full of primal foods.

And no they did not include Dorritos and Ramen to replenish the salt lost in the desert heat! (Inside joke, check comments.)

The staples were beef/bison/chicken, eggs, and bacon. We used bacon grease for everything – extra energy (we pretty much ate all the grease at every meal) and bigger fires (grease fires in the fire pit are way cool).

The three of us all follow pretty different Primal type diets so I’ll give you a few different views here.

Three Slightly Different Diets

Peggy: is the greasy meat eater. While camping I ate extra meat and eggs, plus canned sardines and tuna with lime. I also made lemonade with lemons and cane sugar a couple times a day. (I will go into this further next week when I write about what I eat and why. It’s not about energy. The reason may surprise you.)

Julian: loves his vegetables. He had to have some veggies on the trip so he kept a bag of mixed greens, eating leaves right from the bag with most meals (so weird to me). He also ate roasted red pepper straight off the camp fire (delicious I’m sure) and munched baby carrots. Julian also eats nuts and queso fresco (fresh cheese which is not aged). He brought a six pack of coconut water and a six pack of beer.

Evelyn: is totally obsessed with being just like her mom so she doesn’t eat vegetables either (which I am fine with because she agreed long ago that if she doesn’t eat veggies then she has to eat oysters and liver which she does every week). But she doesn’t want to be quite like mom because mom doesn’t eat fruit and she really likes fruit. She doesn’t usually like nuts (probably because I don’t eat them) but on this trip she ate lots of raw cashews and pistachios. Evelyn also likes a little bit of jack cheese but she skips the beer.

Our Meals On the Camping Trip

The food we carried:
In the pantry bag we carried fresh fruit including oranges, mangoes, apples, lemons, and bananas. We also stocked up on dried mango and pineapple (dried fruit is usually mostly off limits but I didn’t want to deal with a kid complaining of hunger the whole trip). There were the cans of fish, cashews and pistachios, raw cane sugar, and beef jerkey (which we bought, unfortunately, so I couldn’t eat it. I forgot to make some before we left!) We had one big cooler for the meats, cheese, and veggies, plus a beer cooler and a special cooler just for the several dozen pastured eggs that we brought from home. We packed them raw. I didn’t want to be stuck eating hard boiled eggs for 8 days.

Breakfast was always plenty of bacon and eggs cooked in all the grease. That was it for me so I would have an extra bacon or egg (or both). Evelyn and Julian both added fruit and Julian always added a hunk of cheese.

Snacks while hiking consisted of jerky, dried fruit, and nuts. I don’t snack.

Lunch was often a can of sardines for me until we could stop and cook some beef. I didn’t always get a chance to eat a whole lot in the afternoons but the other two filled up with nuts, and dried fruit. Neither of them are as willing as I am to go hungry (though Julian doesn’t mind skipping breakfast at all).

Dinner was a lot of fun. We traveled late in the day on this trip, leaving a spot right about when the rains came. We would arrive at our new campsite around dusk and quickly set up the tent before dark. Hungry but relaxed, we started the fire and would cook up a bone in, skin on chicken breast wrapped in bacon and some red pepper with carrots (for them), and maybe topped with another egg for me.

Cheating:
There is always some small allowance for cheating on the Paleo diet if it’s kept simple and grain free (nuts are cheating for me). On a couple of our long drives I was so hungry while the other two were eating fruit and nuts that I decided to have some pistachios. They made me feel horrible as usual. Nuts are soooo bad for me. (I did the same thing a few days later with the raw cashews. Cashews are a little easier on me but still not great.)

I really wanted to try roasted marshmallows again because I used to love them camping when I was a teenager. This time around they gave me a stomach ache and a bad mood the next day. We threw the bag away. Some treats just aren’t worth it.

In Moab we found some coconut ice cream at the health food store which was surprisingly pure. It’s rare that coconut anything doesn’t have guar gum or carrageenan, which messes up my stomach. The last two days of the trip we were driving a whole lot and ran into some Hagen Daaz at a gas station. We indulged in that as well.

That’s about it for treats and cheats. We didn’t spend the whole vacation thinking about food. We brought good food with us and largely satisfied our cravings and our hunger with a very high fat intake. That is our trick. Fill up and indulge in high fat and your cravings will be minimal.

A quick note about high fat: Some of you may have noticed that I didn’t mention pemmican. I mostly ran out before the trip and had to save what I have left for our Denver Paleo Meetup which is this Sunday. I survived without the pemmican but it would have been nice to have it. It would have saved me from eating nuts those couple of times. It definitely wouldn’t have saved me from eating the ice cream, however. I really wanted that…

What Vacation is All About

These eight days were about being together and escaping the daily grind. We got to know each other all over again and on a deeper level. Since kids grow so fast, it’s easy to lose track of who they are as they change. As the demands of home and work can be relentless, it’s easy to lose sight of what we love about each other and how lovely is our primal backyard.

Vacations give us the chance to get it all back together. I have found this is less true if the focus of a vacation is on food. In fact, this seems to be true for life in general. Modern foods make us feel like crap. They make us act and think differently than we otherwise would. They make us physically uncomfortable, distracting us from much of what is happening around us. Eating pure foods on a vacation is the best way to have a real experience of the people you’re with and the culture or environment you’re in.

Our primal camping trip gave all of us a chance to slow down, to think, and to really watch and listen to each other. It was one of the best vacations I’ve ever had.

Side notes:
It turns out that while I was gone Mark from MDA wrote an article about what to eat while camping and vacationing. His offers more general suggestions so I thought I would include the link since this article is about what my family ate on this specific trip.

And lastly, there were a few comments left on my notice that I’d be out of town so I included them below so that they wouldn’t be lost.

Some additional details

For anybody interested in our particular route and activities I’ll add a little extra here. (This comes as an edit because I didn’t think of it at first.)

We stayed in a campground only once. That was in the Canyonlands because the office was closed when we arrived and we couldn’t get a back country permit (you need back country permits to camp off the beaten path in National Parks). At Arches we drove North on 191 a couple of miles from the park entrance to Mill Canyon Rd. Camping is legal there on an off road trail.

We found a pretty lake somewhere on the way to Lake Powell and so we stayed there a night. We bathed in the cold waters which felt amazing after 3 days with no showers.

We went to South Lake Powell due to inclement weather. On the Utah side you can camp anywhere you want on the beach. It’s not a formal campground but there are some bathrooms. Someone told us about a great view up County Rd off 89. So on our second afternoon there we went out to see it. We never got even close to what this guy was talking about because we were driving on this dirt road forever, but it turned out to be the most amazing off-roading I’ve ever even heard of because the terrain changed so frequently and dramatically.

The geology in the area is really wild with rocks slowly melting off from the top down. All through the area (from Arches down to Grand Canyon) there are spires, canyons, buttes, arches, balancing rocks, and all types of rock formations. Here is one picture I got from this drive that just blows my mind.

The strangest scenery I've ever seen

Instead of stressing out in the tourist trap of the South Rim, Grand Canyon, we went to the North Rim. While the campground was full inside, the North Rim is surrounded by National Forest which is totally campable. The park attendant even gave us a map of the road system. We drove about 15 miles on National Forest dirt roads until we finally came to a totally secluded view of the Canyon. It was probably the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. There was even a small meadow of butterflies flitting near the cliff’s edge. Here is a picture from our private little spot where we had lunch that day.

Our very own view of the Grand Canyon

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35 Comments

  1. Sounds great. I’d like to do some camping myself later this year when it gets cooler for a more primal experience. Have fun!

  2. Oh! Sounds like a GREAT vacation! On Thursday we leave for just a few days for a family reunion at some hot springs. I can’t wait!!!! Eating will be a challenge, though, because the meals will be combined with the extended family and other people are in charge of food. I’m thinking of bringing some of our own food to supplement, and then trying not to eat anything too damaging at the family meals.

    I am curious…do you bring much to entertain your child? We never bring much for our boy when we go somewhere because I want him to play with nature and engage with his surroundings, but I also know toys are really comforting when in unfamiliar surroundings.

    Oh, yeah, I posted my article on different kinds of diets. It’s totally based on my personal experience, so I am sure will differ somewhat from your views. :)

    Happy vacationing!!!

  3. Oh, I am so interested to know what you ate on the road! I’m a new paleo (primal?) girl and I’m heading out to Burning Man this year for the first time with this new healthy outlook and intention. Our previous Burning Man shopping went like this “It’s important to have the Dorritos and ramen noodles because you need the salt out in the desert.” Now that I know better, I am excited to see what we can come up with. Pemmican is on top of the list but I’m kind of lost for veggies for camping a week in an uninhabitable desert….

  4. Hi Peggy

    I recently found your web site an I like it!!
    I’ve read through a few of your articles and see you mention coconut cookies as a treat for your daughter. I would love to get the recipe ;)

    And about the pemmican sticks. They look and sound interesting but I live in Iceland so it’s difficult for me to find them. Do you have any ideas to substitute them with?

    Sorry about any wrong spelling og something like that, english is not my first language.

    I’ll keep reading
    Thank you ;)

  5. Your pictures are beautiful and your trip sounds lovely. Your daughter is going to have some amazing childhood memories! Kudos to you for teaching your daughter primal living when she is young. I hope to see primal and paleo lifestyles becoming more and more maintstream. Your blog is a great source of information for people and I applaud you for it!

    • Thank you Jessica. Teaching is the best part about raising primal kids. It’s really rewarding now that Evelyn is getting old enough to tell me about her world. The other day she came home from pre-school and said, “Mom, you won’t believe what they had for snack today, cookies! Can you believe that?”

      What a treasure it is to hear that stuff.

  6. Hi Peggy – I’m loving your blog! Thanks for sharing your camping trip.
    I’m glad you mentioned your banana allergy – I think I am allergic to bananas as well, because if I eat them I get shaky and sweaty and can’t keep them down. My boyfriend tells me I’m crazy and that “there’s nothing in bananas to be allergic to!”

    • I wish that were true. A body can react to anything. All things have some sort of chemicals and when our immune systems are compromised, they get confused and assume that even good things are bad things. It takes avoiding them completely to give your immune system a break so that it can recover.

      By the way I am also extremely allergic to rice! and also asparagus and cucumbers. Those are the worst foods for me to eat. I get shaky, depressed, bad skin, my heart rate rises. It’s a mess.

  7. Thanks for the “meal plans”! I have been primal for just a couple of months now, and I stay home, so eating isn’t a big deal for me. However, my husband does long day trips all summer for work, and packing his lunch can sometimes be a struggle. He has just recently started eating like I do. I’ve found that turkey roll-ups (turkey, cheese, and veggies) are one of his favorites. And he absolutely will not give up fruit, so I’ve started making home-made “cliff bars” for him with blueberries, huckleberries, apricots, almonds, and a little honey. Even my nephew loves these, and it makes trips to the park and the lake SO MUCH EASIER! However, I have to say that I look forward to having my own kiddo, who eats like us all the time from day 1, since that’s not the case with my nephew…its like a daily struggle to get him off icky junk food every day. Blah!

  8. Peggy:

    Great post. Before reading it, I never had any interest in camping. But now I do, and I see how to go about it, from lots of angles. So thanks for all of this!

    My daughter is 12 and I think she just might go for it, in the right settings, and yours look pretty right.

    Your daughter is beautiful. What a sweet group you are. Great pics.

    Susan

  9. I’ve been loving your blog for a while, but I don’t think I realized until now that you only eat meat and eggs. And when I realized that, my reaction was “oh, that sounds like fun.” So, I’m thinking I maybe should try it. Are the oysters and organ meats crucial for making up for nutrients that would otherwise come from vegetables? Could you/did you do a post on a meat/egg-only diet? Sounds like something that would really work for me.

  10. I’m with Sally! I didn’t realize this either until today, and would love to see a post like that! I feel like eating only meat and eggs would make living primal even eaiser for me…I’m getting exhausted from constantly cooking!

  11. Susan,

    That would be great if we inspired you to go camping! It’s worth all the hassle. I’m glad you stopped by. That reminds me to go read your article about the brain!

    Sally and Lindsey,

    The post you desire is already in the making! Your comments actually surprised me for a moment. There are other people out there that think this diet is cool, not just useful? Awesome. Personally, I love my diet. It’s so easy and comfortable. And yes, Sally, organs and seafood provide essential nutrients that muscle meats don’t have.

  12. Peggy, how did you find out which foods you were allergic to or most allergic to? Did you just do an elimination diet or did you have formal testing?

    The reason I ask is because I’m trying to figure out what my body does and doesn’t like, and have found allergy testing at the dr to be quite useless. They will only do blood testing on a few select known allergens (wheat, latex, and avocado for me). But I know there are services available for a price where one can send away their DNA -usually hair- and get a full report back on over 300 foods. Wonder if its worth it..

    • Heather,

      I have heard of those tests too and was always a little skeptical so I never had my allergies tested for that reason. I tried elimination diets for a long long time and never could get anywhere with that. Turns out I have so many allergies to things I would have never suspected, I would have had no luck in pinning them down.

      I experienced some severe trauma last year and started seeing a naturopathic doctor. She suggested I have my IgG and IgE allergies tested through a company she uses called Genova Diagnostics. They test for over 80 different foods using the same methods that your doctor’s lab uses. They just test for quite a bit more.

      Anyway, it REALLY helped me narrow down what was sabotaging my efforts. I mean, I’ve always been ok with an all meat diet (I’m not allergic to any meats) but when I start to experiment I get into big trouble. I never thought you could be allergic to bananas so when I was in Colombia last year I ate plantains because they’re in everything over there and I was MISERABLE. Now I know never to do that again. There is a scale for allergies. A few of them came back red – extremely allergic – and some of them a little less severe.

  13. It looks like a great time was had by all, Peggy. I love that part of the world – a number of years ago, my brother and I spent a week just outside of Moab in a canyon. It was an exquisite time of doing nothing and just enjoying the solitude of the desert. Thanks for sharing!

  14. Inspiring post! I always enjoy that you emphasize the immaterial. It’s a refreshing change from the usual, this-is-how-I-exercise-and-eat blogs.

    I’m also really looking forward to your next post – I suspect you eat much like I do, so it’ll be good to see how you manage it.

  15. Hal,

    That sounds great. You know this trip was a toss up between seeing many beautiful places or just chillin in one. We all decided that we’re going to have to take another trip to just hang out at one camp and get to know that area well. One of my brothers has done extensive traveling in the area. I mean, he lived out in the deserts of Utah for I don’t know, maybe a year. This was before Man vs Wild ever came out – before reality TV existed. I admire him, though, for his ability to leave civilization behind, fend for himself, and be quite. He’s traveling again now. He’s been gone for a year with his backpack in 30 countries. Cool guy.

    Jade,

    Thanks! I guess that’s my college training talking. :) Always focused on the abstract. (My math degree was not applied – only pure math for me.) Of course, I think one post and little sprinklings here and there about how I exercise and eat will be helpful for many.

  16. I’m really curious about the lemonade you mentioned. I’ll be looking forward to reading that next week.

    Can I ask why you don’t eat veggies? Is it just to make things easier or is there some health reason behind it?

  17. Hi Peggy,

    Like your site and I just sub subscribed to your newsletter and read your vacation post :) I’m new to paleo eating and have been a long time raw vegan. I wonder, how come you do not eat veggies and how do you keep ALKALINE eating only or mostly acidic foods?

    • Hi Kristof and welcome to eating Primal! Having an alkaline balance is not about eating alkaline foods. Just as getting fat is not about eating fat. Another silly myth. Cultures all over the world (and animals I might add) do perfectly fine on all meat diets.

      • Hi Peggy, I know that the eating fat makes you fat is totally false, i always known this and (just read gary taubes book that is really good on this subject). Do you have any links/ or book recommendations regarding that – meat and alkaline balance? I just bought the paleo diet and paleo diet cookbook from loren cordain, paleo solution from robb wolf, everyday paleo and then the primal books from Mark Sisson. (waiting for it to be delivered, i’m in EU) That probably is a good start. But please let me know where I can read more about that – what you mentioned – that is fascinating! Now I haven’t eating any meat for the last 14 years! but i started to add eggs and raw dairy (kefir milk, cheese and butter) to my diet and it feels great. At some point soon, I want to try raw grassfed meat and fish.. I’m excited to get more into paleo and see what it turns out too. Have a great weekend, Thank you! :)

  18. That vacation sounds like so much fun. I went to college in Utah. Even though the lack of much greenery and water was a bit depressing to me, I was always in awe of the beauty of the landscape. Sadly, I was too busy studying to have much fun. :(

    Interesting about your reaction to the nuts. It makes me think even more that you might have a problem with salicylates because pistachios are high and cashews are low.

    I want a vacation so bad. A real one. Not a two-day family reunion where you have to work around other people’s time-tables and big family meals.

    • I’m just about sure of it myself! I’ve been looking over that food list and it’s pretty telling. I can’t tolerate wine, for example either. I have to drink vodka when I drink. Wine makes me feel so terrible. I’m really glad you wrote about that on your website because it might just save me from a little pain and suffering, :)

  19. This is great! We were just camping this weekend and I had my trip on the blog rotation for this week! I love what you say about how it’s a vacation and there are some things you eat just for fun because you are on vacation. For me, I was able to avoid ice cream this trip, but I did have a handful of m&m’s my boyfriend insisted on me eating (I didn’t put up much of a fight) and a few bites of grilled potatoes. No biggie, I eat pretty well all week so can afford a few bites of fun things!

  20. I took my three kids canoe camping and kept us going on bacon, eggs, salami, cheese, pemmican and tuna (in envelops) along with some oatmeal, dehydrated potatoes and trail mix. Not ‘big P’ primal, but pretty good. These things kept fine without refrigeration for 5 days (the cheese got greasy but tasted fine), just stowed in the food pack which sat in the canoe (in direct sun at least part of the day). There don’t allow cans in the area we camped, so no sardines. I put eggs in a large tupperware box and none of them broke (the food pack will inevitably get dropped and tossed a bit).

  21. This post is full of some good advice, and it’s perfect timing for me,too. My best friend and I have been trying to plan a camping trip for a while now. It’s hard to find a good spot when you’re based in Los Angeles, though. Too many big cities in the way of the wilderness. We’ll find a way. It just might take a little extra driving.

  22. Hey Peggy! Just wanted to let you know I got my first US Wellness shipment in…loaded with Pemmican bars! Dude…that stuff is ROCKET FUEL! Love it. I would have probably never tried it if it weren’t for your high praise. Thanks!

  23. Hi There
    We are organic beef farmers in South Tipperary, Ireland. All our cattle are grass fed year round on our hill farm. Just letting you know in case anyone wants to get grass fed beef in Ireland. Our website is http://www.omegabeefdirect.ie
    All the best, Eileen

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