Vegetarian Hiking

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Imagine this: You're planning the hike of your life and your dietary preferences preclude the following foods: chicken, beef jerky, tuna, and summer sausage; all typical foods found in small towns and hikers' packs. So, is it possible to hike or thru-hike on a vegetarian diet? Of course, but it requires more planning, attention to combining certain foods together to create complete proteins, and some creative ordering in small-town restaurants.

I've spent the past ten years of my life as a vegetarian, and during the last four of those years I traveled the full lengths of the Appalachian, Pacific Crest, and Continental Divide National Scenic Trails while maintaining a vegetarian diet.

During the 1990s vegetarianism became popular, hip, or cool—a trend if you will. A fad rose out of the movement to the point it became fashionable to identify oneself as such. Often I'd hear about or meet people who were"vegetarians," but their definition of vegetarian included chicken and fish. According to the dictionary in my library, vegetarian is defined as one who eats no meat or fish, and, in some cases, nothing derived from an animal, like milk or eggs. For the record and sake of semantics there are a few forms of vegetarianism with varying degrees of strictness, but none of them include fish or meat, white or dark, in any form.

The purist form of vegetarianism is vegan. People who maintain vegan diets avoid all meat, fish, and products derived from animals including milk, eggs, and even honey. Lacto-ovo vegetarians avoid meat and fish but do eat some some foods derived from animals, such as eggs, cheese, milk, and honey. Though it is possible to hike vegan, it requires additional planning along with extreme discipline. Therefore I find it simpler, on and off the trail, to follow a lacto-ovo diet because it's more variable and flexible.