Old thread, but we still have to eat, so...
When riding from home, I usually start with a decent breakfast of hot oatmeal with milk and perhaps an egg and fried sausage or Spam (sometimes turkey Spam) and fruit or a muffin. If it is a really big ride (say, a 400km day), then I stop by McDonald's for something fatty that is slow-burning. Usually that is a sausage McMuffin with cheese (base= English muffin with fried egg, sausage patty, slice of American Cheese), hash browns (a patty of shredded potato, fried), and hot coffee (decaf, with plenty of sugar and enough milk so it is a pale tan in color). I can almost hear my arteries clog and slam shut as I write this. Still, when exercising hard, I seem to not only tolerate, but crave it. If I ate something like that normally, I'd be trying to scrape the grease off my tongue. When riding hard, it seems to "burn clean".
While on-tour (the multi-day variety), I generally awaken at 4:50-5AM and break camp so I can be on the road as soon as possible, usually by 5:20-5:30 or so. I often seem to get in 20-25 miles/32-40km before stopping to eat. It is usually an energy bar or three nibbled with and some electrolyte-replacement drink/water while riding or briefly stopped along with some dried fruit -- typically bananas and raisins and pineapple or apple and a few nuts. If it is particularly cold or I just get the notion, I'll boil some water and do the whole nine yards -- hot cocoa, tea, or apple cider mix, a packet or two of instant oatmeal, and reconstituted powdered milk. I've been taking some small cups of foil-capped applesauce on recent trips, and find those taste very good early in the morning.
Midmorning, I'll snack on something else, typically in the meat-protein category, like canned Vienna sausage, or a small tin of Beanie-Weenie; cold is fine. Lunch is something similar with fruit from my dried stock, and dinner is the big meal of the day, made in camp and cooked on the stove. Supper seems to consist of a dried-soup base, fortified with meat from a pouch or dried (fish or chicken breast from a tin or foil pouch, dried beef or turkey jerkey) and dried vegetables, hot cocoa, tea, or apple cider, and cheese and/or tinned meat or fish on crackers with fruit (canned mandarin oranges = great!). Bread doesn't seem to travel very well for me (either going stale and dry at one extreme or moldy at the other). Sturdy crackers like Rye-Krisp seem to do well. Dessert is an energy bar of some sort, typically the granola and dried-fruit in fruit syrup variety. I find Luna Bars (
http://www.lunabar.com/ ) very tasty, almost like a cookie, but they seem to be marketed primarily to women. <shrug> Taste good t'me. I try to eat an energy bar or something similar just before I slide off into sleep, as it makes a real difference in keeping me warm through the night.
Looking at what I've written, it appears awfully spartan, and I do lose about a pound a day for each day I'm on-tour, up to a month and then it sort of levels out. I try to nibble throughout the day so I am never really starved, and that helps prevent my stores from depleting. Way back to when I first started touring and cycle-camping over 32 years ago, I've found the harder I work, the more my appetite slacks off, so I have learned to nibble and graze on little things throughout the day, even if I don't feel the need. The old cycling mantra, "eat before you're hungry, drink before you're thirsty" has always worked well for me. If I don't, then I realize I've dug a hole for myself and it takes awhile to get out of it and feel my energy is back where it should be. I get leg cramps if I don't take 0.75l of electrolyte-water mix at 50% dilution after every 2-3l of clear water. I take Gatorade in powdered form and mix it as I need.
If I'm where I can get a big, decent meal once a day every 3-4 days or so, I can and do (often can't). Where I go (ranching country), that means a steak, garlic bread and a green salad or a huge beef-based hamburger with a big leafy green salad and steak fries (super-sized French fries with ketchup topping). There's not many restaurants in much of the Great Basin, and those that are there often don't have vegetarian-specific meals. I guess I am fortunate in eating pretty much anything that is available and that has included some interesting things, like some variety of snake at a diner in Nebraska, of all places, and horse meat bitterballen (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitterballen ) in Belgium and the Netherlands. I developed a real taste for whole raw herring pickled in their own digestive juices (
http://dutchfood.about.com/od/glossaryhijk/g/Haring.htm ) and they slid down real good head, tail, and all. Surprised me, but I'd get them here if I could. When I went touring with my Dutch friend, we ate broodie hagelslag (bread/broodie -- or in our case, Rye-Krisp crackers -- covered with chocolate sprinkles/hagelslag and colored "dots" -- a common Dutch breakfast treat (
http://dutchfood.about.com/od/aboutdutchcooking/ss/3DailyMeals_2.htm ), as well as stroopwafels (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroopwafel ) and fresh or dried fruit for breakfast or small packets of jams and jellies. Sometimes, we'd supplement it with a pasteboard box carton of the Dutch equivalent of Yoo-hoo (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoo-hoo ). He is vegetarian, so we would often eat a sort of stew made of a pasta or brown rice base, sliced tomatoes and tomato sauce, fresh peas, and cashews and sometimes beans for protein. Since most of the ingredients were dry and in bulk, it took some time to soak and then cook.
Though I really enjoy food and know what Good Food is (yes! really! despite what I wrote above), on a bike trip it gets reduced to simple fuel, and I don't have many cravings, though I did ride all day through desert heat sustained by the occasional roadside sign promising root-beer floats (vanilla ice cream floating in a huge mug of carbonated root beer). I was bitterly disappointed to finally arrive and find not only the restaurant, but the entire town were no longer in existence -- having joined many other small villages in becoming a recent ghost town.
Best,
Dan.
