At 6’1 and 250 pounds I’m certainly not one to say what’s good for you and what’s not but I can promise you that many if not most of my fondest memories are centered around food. Camp food, wild game, cooking over an open fire, MRE’s on a mountain top in Colorado, vienna sausage and crackers with Dad and brother Al in the Homochitto National forest, my wife’s cheese grits served with fried turkey breast, can Cokes than taste like fish because they were in the same ice chest as our bass, a sausage biscuit hard as a rock because it stayed on the dash of your truck all day while you chased a rude gobbler. You get the picture; it’s more about the people you were eating with than the food itself. OK, in my case it all kind of runs together but I can’t imagine getting back to the truck at noon after hunting all morning and me and my buddy busting open a bag of bean sprouts and chugging down a jug of green tea and reliving the morning. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
For me at least once I was passed the "I gotta kill something” stage, the preparation for the hunting or fishing trip became at least as important as the hunting or fishing. How many people that you hunt with spend more time getting the food for camp ready than their gear. Recipes handed down for generations on how to prepare seafood gumbo, hunting camp stew, duck breast, venison roast, pies, cakes, cheesy potatoes and baked beans become as cherished as your favorite shotgun or bow. It’s the same way with camp stories, at least half the tall tales from hunting camp will be about the food, ole Joe’s fried tenderloin or big John’s chili will get as much air time as someone’s buck story. There are many common threads intertwined in these camps, cooks and tales but the one constant is good people. There’s something about these folks, these hunting, fishing, camping out, charcoaling, Mossy Oak clad smiling nimrods that sometimes eat too much, that raises them to a higher level at least in my book.
