group camping and food

Summary of question: Should I organize food sharing for a bunch of misfits a week before our big camping trip Summary of answer: Nope.

Could you send out an email saying something like: Dear friends, We are so looking forward to seeing you all this weekend. Traditionally we all bring and cook food for ourselves. This year we were thinking that it might be fun to do something like a weekend-long potluck. This is an informal survey to find out what your thoughts are. Would you like to bring a dish to share? If so please let me know what you would like to bring so we can fill in the gaps. If you would rather not then feel free to let us know that too.

We couldn't get this together for three couples (six people) at my friend's shore house last month. Trying for 25-30 people seems doomed to fail. Chaos it is!

Is anyone seriously hurting for money, to the point where doing this would make or break whether they could go on this trip? I'm guessing not, since you have a lot of people coming anyway. So I'd just say not to worry about it. Doing something like this will probably ruin the weekend for you.

My father in law organizes all the food for an annual fishing trip, but he's only able to do it because everyone who will be there commits well ahead of time. FIL makes a meal plan, a grocery list, and does all the shopping (or delegates). It doesn't sound as if you can possibly do this with such a spontaneous gathering. Perhaps you could handle it as an extended potluck? Tell potential attendees what cooking equipment you will be providing. Ask them to bring any other special equipment that they might need for whatever food prep they plan to do. Point out that each person does not need to make enough of each dish to feed everyone there; instead, each should bring roughly the amount of food that they will consume during their entire stay.

We all end up bringing the same kinds of foods- eggs and bacon for breakfast and some kind of meat to grill for dinner. Me and one other person will be making a big pot meal to share. If we all bring the same stuff anyway, do I really need to do this? There are a bunch of annoying aspects that come into play when people start sharing food. Do some people only want some certain type of bacon? We someone get upset if they bring a small amount of some type of food they like and it gets eaten by everyone else? When people are in charge of their own food you don't have to deal with any of that. Is there just going to be too much food no matter what we do? Probably. People always tend to bring more food than they need because they don't want to run out, or they don't want to spend the last day eating just eggs and marshmallows or whatever random food is left. If anything having a community food supply is just going to make calculating how much food to bring more difficult.

Because time is short, I'd say let the chips fall where they may this year and talk to everyone about whether they'd be interested in having you coordinate a more organized food situation next year. But I think you'd have to make it clear that you'd kind of have to know who's coming ahead of time to make it work. At this point, the spontaneity and silly amount of food may be part of the fun for people. Imposing some sort of order will probably limit the fun for some people, so I'd just float the idea at this year's extravaganza and see what people think. If the food isn't going to waste (people take it home and use it there), the excess may not actually be that big of a problem.

With that many variables, the universe really is in charge. Maybe just remind people that they are not required to feed 20 people, and to just bring the around the amount of food they will be consuming themselves. There will always be extra, but reminder might help ease it up a bit.

I used to be part of an annual thanksgiving weekend camping extravaganza. Based on that experience - similar numbers, similar time frames, similar food issues - I have to say, don't even try to corral anything at this late stage in the game. We had a fairly consistent rotation of turkey and sides, and you can only imagine the contingencies involved in cooking a turkey in the woods, and every year there was someone who had an Idea that was really just a solution in search of a problem. I agree that sometimes food gets wasted on camping trips, but I suggest that your energy might be better spent keeping the kiddos (and some adults) from dispensing treats to the raccoons. Not only do people have prefernces for bacon brands, but also doneness, quantity, mealtimes, beverages, double dipping, and condiments. Joe bringing the mustard is going to lead to three other people still bring mustard because they don't trust joes judgement, and 6 people dissapointed in their sandwiches (however briefly) because the mustard was all wrong. (where mustard is any food/condiment and sandwiches are any dish/meal) As a pretty hard core camper, I'm learning to loosen up a bit and let folks overpack if they decide to. I have some micromanaging tendencies, and they usually don't make the woods more fun.