Every modern snack food is a derivative of trail mix, which means that all snack makers, on some level, are related to Euell Gibbons. This dude did a Grape-Nuts commercial in the seventies where he said, “Ever eat a pine tree? Many parts are edible.” In general, people ended up making fun of old Euell for that and it earned him the lifelong label of wood-eater. But from what I see these days in grocery and convenience stores it seems like there’s a crapload of wood-eaters out there.

People appear to be lining up to eat a lot of really random stuff, stuff your typical rodent would spit out in a hot second, and it’s mostly because these are labeled as “healthy” or “organic” or “all natural” or “biometrically engineered” or “super-energy formula” or “no added sugar” or “optimally balanced” or … you get the drill. Well, it’s all just trail mix, put into a fancy package or given a fancy name or somehow molded and shaped and stamped into a bar so that you can put it in your pocket and then pull it out and eat it when you get to the top of Mount Everest or once you cross the finish line of the Olympic marathon.

Boy, has trail mix come a long way – mostly backward. Its invention is self-explanatory, that is, a mixture of shit a dude could eat on the trail. It was supposed to be something light and easy to carry, something that wouldn’t spoil and have a reasonable quotient of nutritional value so that people out looking for Sasquatch, the guys with those long sticks that shepherds carry, can get a little energy boost.

Nuts, raisins and chocolate – in some combination – emerged on the trail as early as 1910 or so. From there we did what we Americans are great at, we took something simple and marginally healthy and made it fattening and addictive. We took the innocent granola and added processed sugar and fat and butter and candy pieces and covered it all in chocolate and called it an energy bar. These are the mass-produced “granola bars” most of us grew up with.

They were essentially candy bars with some oats sprinkled on top and they were delicious. Moms could rationalize them as a “healthy” snack and all was really groovy for a long time.

Then … something happened … something bad and unexplainable … and wood eaters and vegetable militants ruined granola bars and many, many others forms of food forever – but the first thing they wrecked was the trail mix.

Trail mix … something to eat on the trail … something salty, something sweet … put some candy in there, maybe some butter toffee peanuts, some cereal … it’s okay if it’s a little spicy. That was trail mix, again, a basic concept that mainstream America then added sugar and salt to because we used to be a country that was all about FLAVOR – it should taste good first.

But then the food bureaucracy zeroed in on trail mix like a Patriot Missile locked on to the target. We all thought trail mix should be about eating something tasty on the trail, they thought trail mix was something you should find on the trail.

So now there’s a big section at food stores, usually next to the Planters peanuts and the beef jerky with hundreds of kinds of what used to be called trail mix, each with a combination of disgusting objects and textures that the health food community found, well, on the trail.

You’ll find every kind of nut except the ones that taste good, hard, tasteless chunks of coconut seem popular. Brightly-colored dried fruits fill most bags of modern trail mix. Americans know what you’re supposed to do with dried fruit. When the fruit in the bowl gets dried out at home we do what comes naturally, we throw it out. Some people want you to eat it … makes no sense.

The rest of the bags of this stuff contain things campers typically drop on the trail or stuff that ends up in piles alongside the trail. I swear in some of these packages I’ve observed leaves and bark and pieces of thread and buttons and paper clips; blades of grass and sand and moth wings and the yellow part of a dandelion.

If you find yourself in the market for trail mix, scrutinize the package closely. Lots of companies are trying to trick you into eating foreign objects that were never intended to be consumed.

One of the first things most of us learned is, don’t eat stuff you find on the ground. Now health food companies are putting those things in Ziplock bags, labeling them “all-natural” and charging $9.99 a pop. You’re better than that. There are lots of good candy bars you can eat on the trail.

Photo credit: blavandmaster on Best Running / CC BY-NC-SA