Meal Planning

Meal plans....I used to cringe at the thought of having to plan a whole weekend of food for girls and leaders. There are lots of questions when it comes to this kind of planning;

• Where do I start?
• How much do we charge for food at camp?
• How do we include the girls?

Let's start from the beginning......

Where do I start?

The best place to start is by deciding how many meals you need. This will all depend on how long your camp is - is it two nights or one night. If it is one night do you need dinner, breakfast etc? If it is two nights - how late are you leaving on your final day, do you need breakfast and lunch?

I will go with our typical two night camp for the purpose of this post. When we camp we usually go from Friday evening to Sunday before lunch which means we need the following meals;

• Friday night snack
• Saturday Breakfast
• Saturday Lunch
• Saturday Dinner
• Sunday Breakfast

Now that we have our meals we can move on to the next question....budget

How much do we charge for food?

For our camps the rule of thumb we go by is $10/day. So we usually have a total of $20 for the whole weekend for food in our budget. The breakdown of our $20 is as follows

• Friday $5
• Saturday $10
• Sunday $5

Now if you are doing more meals it may be more and if you are doing less meals you may charge less. Some people will say well $20 does not seem like a lot and it doesn't but I can tell you this we have never once had a girl or adult complain about being hungry. If anything we usually have too much food.

*Please remember I am giving guidelines for how we do things it may vary from unit/district/area

How do we include the girls?

Including the girls does not have to be hard. What we usually do is decide which meal each unit is going to decide on because we tend to camp with more than one unit. For example, our upcoming fall camp is Sparks & Brownies. So we decided who would pick what then we poll the girls and that is how they decide.

At this level we usually start the conversation by asking what sort of foods they eat for ________ meal. The girls will give us their ideas then we continue with well which of these foods do you think would be easy for us to make at camp? We keep doing this till we have narrowed it down to 3 options and then we have the girls vote

Another way to do this would be to talk about healthy eating and have girls build their ideal camp menu in their patrols or circles; this could fit into the Be Well program area then from there they can come together as a group and pick which meals they want to use at their camp.

Odds and ends

The above are the basics that we as a unit go through to plan our meals for camp. There are other things we consider such as;

• How easy the meals are to prep
• Can they be done in bulk
• How do we accommodate food restrictions/allergies within the meal

I hope this keep tips have helped some of you in part and cannot wait to hear how your next meal planning meeting goes!!