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I have stood in an airport at half past five in the morning, seventeen hours from my next real meal, looking at a display case containing nine kinds of sandwich and a banana.
That is the moment. Not the birthday cake. Not the restaurant. The airport, at half past five, when you are tired and there is nothing.
I lost three weeks of progress to that display case before I worked out the obvious thing: the problem is not willpower. The problem is that I arrived with an empty bag.
Now I pack food the way I pack a passport. It goes in first, and I do not leave without it.
I have thrown a lot of things away in hotel bins over the years. The ones that survive all pass the same four tests.
That last one is the killer. Read the back of almost any jerky packet and you will find sugar in the first three ingredients. It is meat with sweets sprinkled on it.
Not glamorous. Not interesting. The single most useful thing in my bag.
I take Chomps original beef sticks, which are grass-fed, have no sugar, and are individually wrapped so you can put four in a coat pocket and forget about them until you need them.
Ten grams of protein each. They live in the side pocket of every bag I own.
My rule is one in the coat, always. It is not there for a planned meal. It is there for the moment at half past five when there is nothing but sandwiches.
Biltong is air-dried instead of heat-dried, which sounds like a small distinction and is not.
It is not chewy in that jaw-aching way jerky is. It has no marinade, no sugar, no sticky glaze. It is beef, salt, vinegar and time, and it tastes far more like meat than jerky ever did.
I take Stryve original biltong. A bag flattens out and slides down the side of a suitcase, and thirty-six grams of protein per pack means one bag genuinely replaces a meal if it has to.
My husband thinks it looks alarming. He has also eaten most of my supply twice.
They are mostly air. A big bag looks ridiculous in a suitcase, and it will annoy you every time you repack.
Take them anyway.
Zero carbohydrate, seven grams of protein a serving, and, crucially, they are crunchy. Three weeks into carnivore you will discover that you do not miss bread and you do not miss pasta but you miss crunch with a fierceness that surprises you.
I take a family bag of 4505 sea salt chicharrones and squash it flat into a corner. Everything else packs around it.
It is the one thing on this list that stops travel feeling like deprivation.
The most efficient food on this list by a distance. Eighteen grams of protein in a tin the size of a phone, no fridge, no cooking, keeps for years.
I take Wild Planet sardines in olive oil, which are firm and meaty rather than the sad mush I remember from my mother’s cupboard.
The rule: hotel rooms only.
Do not open a tin of sardines on a plane. Do not open one on a train. Do not open one in an open-plan office where you would like people to continue speaking to you. I have made two of those three mistakes.
You will be walking more, sweating more, sleeping badly and eating food that has no hidden sodium in it.
Then you get a headache on day two and blame the flight.
It is almost never the flight. A small shaker of Real Salt in the wash bag weighs nothing and fixes the whole problem. Restaurant food abroad is often under-salted for what your body now needs, and you cannot always ask.
Hard-boiled eggs, because of what a warm bag does to them and what they then do to a room.
Cheese, because it sweats, and because two days later it is not really cheese any more.
Cooked steak in a container, which I did once, with great confidence, and will never do again.
Pack the boring things. The boring things are what get you home still eating the way you meant to.
Britt Malka
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