Rehydrate

• One extremely useful strategy for making your camping food as lightweight as possible is to either buy dehydrated food or to dehydrate food yourself. Dehydrated food has all or most of the moisture removed from it. Then, when you get to camp, you can rehydrate the food, or add the water back in. It's the same process you use to cook pasta, pasta being one good example of a food that you can rehydrate at camp. Beans and vegetables also work well as dehydrated foods, as do soup mixes and whole dehydrated meals that can be purchased from camping food retailers.
  
  

Excess Packaging

• To cut down on the weight of your camping food, remove the excess packaging. Granola bars, for instance, typically come in a cardboard box, and each granola bar is then individually wrapped, so just leave the cardboard box at home. Similarly, you can often buy lighter packaging. Tuna, for instance, typically comes in a can, but can often also be found in plastic containers, which is far lighter. Buying foods such as dehydrated fruits and granola in the bulk section, rather than in individual wrappings, is another good way to save on packaging weight.
  
  

Counting Calories

• Take along calorie-dense foods. Fat, for instance, typically has about twice as many calories, per unit of weight, than carbohydrates do. So taking along butter or olive oil to add to a pasta dish, for instance, would be a good way to get in more calories without adding too much weight. You could repackage olive oil in a lightweight plastic squeeze bottle to save on weight, and make sure to package butter in something like a zip-top bag to avoid a mess in your backpack. Other examples of good calorie-dense foods are coconut oil and chocolate with a high cocoa percentage.
  
  

Cooking Equipment

• Of course a big part of the weight of any camping food list is going to be the cooking equipment itself. One camping stove, for instance, can weight a lot more than another one, depending entirely on the design of the stove itself. Likewise, the fuel that you use can be heavier than some other fuels. Taking along a portable, lightweight fire ring, for instance, and using wood found at the campsite as your fuel source, would be one example of getting your cooking equipment to weigh as little as possible.