For a casual picnic in the city park, more or less any food can be brought. For wilderness backpacking and long outdoor life expeditions far from restaurants and supermarkets, limited carrying space and no refrigeration, travellers need to be more selective.
Camping food is either ready to eat, or prepared through outdoor cooking.
Food preparation is a critical part of camping for hungry hikers and campers are unhappy or even worse hangry. Make a list of all the parameters ie How many days will you be camping for? How many people are you? What is the weather like? Does anyone have any dietary restrictions? Are there places along the way where you can buy more food? If so, you only need to buy food for each segment. Once you've factored all of this in, you can start to calculate how much food you need to take with you on the first part of your journey. When space is critical, you need to be smart in what you take with you. You need to be mindful of how long the food will last. If you're going for a long time and rely on the same menu, people may get bored of it. So you may consider mixing it up or occasionally having a special menu.
At the end of the day, campers have to appreciate they're going out in to the wild and will be roughing it. There won't be three-course meals or the like. Instead of people complaining or getting upset, they should appreciate that this is part of the experience.
Outdoor shops offer food prepared and packaged for use on hikes and expeditions, at high markups. While food in supermarkets is usually cheaper, the preparation and packaging is rarely good for outdoor expeditions. They may also have some of the products found in outdoor shops, and some of their ordinary food is suitable on the trail as well.
Another option is to buy regular food for re-packaging and/or cooking at home, to make rations for individual need, size, and taste.
Some traditional preserved foods may also be seasonally available at farmer's markets or roadside stands directly from producers.
Water is needed for drinking, as well as for making beverages such as coffee and tea. On foot, you can only carry a limited amount of water. There are various methods to make water drinkable, but they all have some drawbacks, be they the need for fuel, taste and health concerns, or simply the time it takes to get water drinkable – and none will be 100% safe to get rid of all possible contaminants.
Packing a few plastic bottles can spare you from buying bottled water, if you can get safe water from other sources (tap water, good wells, water boiled or filtered by yourself, what have you). And a bottle of your choosing is handy if you buy water or other drinkables in packages that cannot be closed once opened.
While alcoholic beverages can provide an experience of relaxation, community and celebration, they drain the body of heat and water, not to mention the impairment of being drunk.
Shelf life varies greatly between different foodstuffs. Properly stored industrial food generally remains good some time past the "best before" time that's stamped on the product, at least for products with a shelf life of several months – but their nutritional and culinary values hardly increase with age. Products with a "use by" date, such as fresh meat, may become unsafe to eat soon after that date.
Anything protected from air will become perishable once the protection is broken. Tins and other products that depend on a sealed envelope should not be consumed if they might be defective. Most products with a metal lid are packed hot, which means there should be negative pressure and a click when they are opened; if not, there has probably been microbiological activity. Bloated cans – which includes cans that are even slightly bulging at the end – are a dead giveaway for Clostridium botulinum contamination, which produces one of the most lethal toxins known to man. When in doubt, throw it out.
Many of the preservation methods rely critically on being performed the right way, such as drying a product fast enough, using absolutely clean cans, having the right amount of preservatives, or keeping a product under the level of the preservation liquid. It is easy to invite Clostridium botulinum or other nastiness. Do not improvise unless you are sure about what you are doing. Also, storing the product in the right way afterwards is important.
Some food prepared to store well does so only at cool or moderate temperatures (5–20°C, 40–70°F). While some signs of food being spoiled are immediately apparent to the unaided human eye or nose, there are some types of microbiological or other contamination that are not apparent to the naked eye. The best way to avoid those is to never store food for much longer, or under vastly different conditions, than it was intended to.
Most preservation methods, but particularly heating, destroy some vitamins. These same methods may also increase the bioavailability of other nutrients. Other methods, such as salt-based methods for drying meat and fish, may greatly increase the sodium and/or sugar content. A varied diet is the best approach.
The body's need of nutrition depends on age and degree of activity. Therefore, military rations in particular are not very suitable for civilian consumption. Even the US Army recommends its MREs to only be used in the field by soldiers and only when there is no suitable alternative. They are designed for a highly active soldier in his or her physical prime.