Food
Food was one of the few things I got right my first year on the playa!
As with all aspects of Burning Man, there are MANY ways to accomplish your solution for food, showers, shelter, etc. Here is what works for me!
Frozen Food
I like to keep it simple, and while in the default world I never buy frozen food anymore, at the burn it is actually pretty much 80% of what I eat. The high sodium content actually feels nourishing (seriously) and in the same way when you camp food tastes better, this food just hits differently at the burn. While off-playa I avoid preservatives.... on the playa I actually think out of the 52 weeks in your year, this IS the week you want them!
Even if you have a plan for fresh food (which I still support, don't get me wrong!) having some basic frozen food vacuum sealed is great for those moments when you get home at sunrise and just don't want to deal with cooking (or cleaning) anything.
I literally go down the aisle at the grocery store and shop just like I did in college. It feels a bit embarrassing but I STACK my cart full of different frozen foods: Alfredo pasta, pesto tortellini, salisbury steak dinner, frozen breakfast meals, fried rice, chow mien, vegan frozen food, you name it. Even if you are not vegan, bring a vegan frozen meal and a way to spruce it up (hot sauce, etc) for your vegan friend when they are exhausted.
On the playa, I usually grab two entrees so I eat a "two course" meal. I usually eat just about every Trader Joe's frozen food over the course of the week. You can also cook your favorite meals and vacuum seal them, but I am already busy enough right before the burn so I don't cook anything. My first burn I brought ~5 frozen mac and cheeses, and they were gone first. My next year I brought around 10. Now, I probably bring over 15, and ever year, they are ALWAYS gone.
Vacuum Sealed Food
The secret is to buy a vacuum sealer. This is great for a couple reasons:
REHEATING ON PLAYA - On the playa when you want to eat, grab a few vacuumed sealed bags of food and throw them in some boiling water. Your food will heat up inside the bag until it is piping hot. This only takes a few a minutes, and then you can just eat out of the bag! The bags are made for high temperatures, so don't worry about boiling the bags, this is what they are designed for!
COOLER SANITATION - You will hear stories of people using zip-lock bags to store their food, and a bag opens up in their cooler, making their entire cooler a disgusting mess of food. You want your cooler to be clean, and full of clear water. If all your food is vacuum sealed, you won't have any issues. One year I even drank my cooler water...just to prove a point to myself.
EASY PREP - The week of the burn, I go to the grocery store and buy every frozen meal I can think of, my favorite being mac and cheese. I then take the food out of the microwave tray and put ONLY the food in the vacuum sealed bag and seal it. Since frozen food already has preservatives, even if your cooler starts to melt a bit, your food will be fine. After a long night on the playa, there is nothing better than coming back to camp and feeding all my friends mac and cheese.
COST - This is also a cheap way to eat. Frozen food is usually $2-5 a meal.
DIVERSITY OF FOOD - Alfredo pasta, pesto tortellini, salisbury steak dinner, frozen breakfast meals, fried rice, chow mien, vegan frozen food, you name it. On the playa, I usually grab two entrees so I eat a "two course" meal. I usually eat just about every Trader Joe's frozen food over the course of the week. I bring plenty extra, and make sure my friends and guests are well fed. You can also cook your favorite meals and vacuum seal them, but I am already busy enough right before the burn so I don't cook anything.
Coolers
If you really want your ice to last a long time, make sure you have a "roto-molded" cooler. Companies that sell these are RTIC, YETI, and Pelican. These are extra-thick coolers.
Your ice should last about 3 days in the heat. Keep your coolers out of the sun. The more you open your cooler, the more your ice melts. I recommend bringing two coolers, and keeping one for the first half of the week and one for the second half. The cooler for the second half of the week should only be opened when you are checking if the ice has melted or not.
I zip-locked my second cooler shut so nobody (including myself) would be tempted to open it on accident. I also used dry ice, and regular ice. I would just barely open the water release valve on the cooler to see if any ice melted. Once some ice melted, I knew the dry ice had fully sublimated and I did an ice run and cut the zip tie.
After you switch to your second cooler, use the first one for drinks or as an "ice-only" cooler for cocktails.
Smoked Salmon (my favorite snack)
Yeah, this deserves it's own heading. I buy smoked salmon from Costco and vacuum seal it in individual portions. I store this in my cooler and eat this with crackers or in a tortilla...or by itself. It's a fast meal, salty, delicious, and if you like lox you will be in heaven on the playa.
Soylent (Meal replacement drink)
If I am too lazy to boil a bag of food (5 minutes), or eat salmon (2 minutes), then I just drink Soylent. When building our camp, I often drink Soylent instead of eating as I am too busy to even spend 5 minutes preparing food, also my own gear is not even set up. Almost every day this is my breakfast.
Eggs
An easier way to bring eggs to the playa is to bring cartons of whole eggs. This is what restaurants often use to save time from cracking drozens of eggs . You can throw one of these in your cooler and you don't need to deal with storing whole eggs. You can find these at wholesale restaurant stores.
This is not to be confused with egg-beaters, which are just the whites. These are the whole eggs! Way tastier.
