Basic food knowledge

I split food into what it is.

Snack: Small treats made by energy rich ingredients. They are good to bring along in a pocket during a hike or as an emergency energy reserve. A good snack is dried fruit, nuts, vegetables or meat such as Beef Jerky or Biltong.
Drink: Can be water, squash, juice, tea or alcoholic brews.
Hot food (including hot soups): Hot food is all types of food that is served hot.
Desert (including cold soups): Desert is food that is eaten as an enchantment to the other food or to end the day with a bit of celebration. Cold soups are often served as a slightly sweet desert but can also be part of the main dish.
Bread
Spices
Salad

A salad is often a mix of green leaves that are served cold and gives you a extra boost of vitamins and minerals. Beyond that is serves to help fill your stomach.

Dried food

To dry your food is a good way to conserve it for extended storage. If the food do not contain any fat and is stored dry and airtight it could remain in storage almost indefinitely. Drying food also reduces its weight and it take less space. Dried food just as salted or any other conservation method need more water when cooking or eating though, to keep the water balance in the body.

Smoked food

Smoking food is both a good way to preserve the food as well as to cook it.

Good material to smoke with

Juniper wood or twigs
Alder wood
Beech wood
Apple wood.

For conservation you can use almost any kind of wood, even grass works. But some trees could give either to much or to little smoke taste while others to easily catch fire which could burn the food. A good idea is to experiment with a mix of different kinds of wood to find your own personal taste of smoked food.

Always put your smoke wood in water a while before starting to smoke, this creates more smoke and lessens the risk of the wood actually catching fire.

There is also two different ways to smoke food, you either smoke with a hot or cold smoke.

Hot smoke

When you hot smoke your food it is at the same time cooked as the temperature in the smoke is above 40 degrees Celsius. This extends the time that the food is edible with several days.

Cold smoke

There are several reasons why one should cold smoke food.

The first reason is that it gives the food a specific taste which is hard to get otherwise. The second reason is that it extends the time the food is conserved extends from a few days to several months if done properly. To get the best conservation results the food need to be dried, salted correctly and you got to have a very good hygiene during the whole process when making the cold smoked food.