What to eat on the Israel National Trail

Beyond camp food: eating smart and eating well while hiking in Israel

Let’s start with the basics. Hiking burns a lot of calories, so you’re going to need to consume a lot of them. Nutritious foods that provide long-term sustenance are the best. And you’ll usually need to carry this food, so you must consider also pack weight and the cost of storage and preparation. So hikers and campers have developed all kinds of strategies and recipes for keeping fed with cheap, light, and easy meal options.

But if you’re coming to Israel from another country, your favorite camp food and trail snacks may not be readily available. Just as an example, you can find dried pasta and minute rice just about everywhere. But granola, ramen noodles, and protein bars are more problematic because while they are available in Israel, they’re not popular, and certainly won’t be found in the tiny grocery stores that you are most likely to encounter. So now you need to consider market availability as you shop for rations.

At the same time, traveling in Israel is a great opportunity to avail yourself of the flavors of this little corner of the Mediterranean world, and a few changes in eating habits can make shopping easier in even the most smallest minimarket, makolet, or kiosk.

This guide is intended to recommend and introduce you to food that you might want to consider eating during your hiking adventure here. We created this list bearing in mind these important factors: availability, portability, cost, and ease of preparation — not forgetting of course flavor and quality! We are also offering some links to purchasing these foods, so that you can try them out before arriving in Israel. (For better or for worse, this is written from a North American perspective, but we know that visitors come from all over the world. Please contact us to tell us what we’re missing!)

In fact, let’s start with flavor and quality! If you are ready for a deep dive, or even just a wonderfully enjoyable reading experience, look no further than Adeena Sussman’s cookbook:

Sababa: Fresh, Sunny Flavors From My Israeli Kitchen

Adeena’s cookbook is a crash course in some of the best of foods that are popular here: a fun and beautifully photographed mix of Arabic, Ashkenazic, Sephardic, Druze, Yemenite, Persian, and Iraqi cultural foods that are wildly popular here, and which have coalesced to form our local cuisine. It is centered largely on the variety of fresh ingredients that are available in the shuk, which are farmer’s markets located in many cities, most notably Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, often built in Ottoman Turkish style. Whether you’re looking to recreate Israeli meals in your own kitchen or looking for shopping tips for the shuk, we highly recommend you start here.

Bamba

Generally speaking, Israelis do not love peanut butter. It’s available in supermarkets, but it’s not the favorite sandwich spread that it is in America. So by supply and demand, what’s available is mediocre and in low quantity. More on that below, but the irony is that Bamba (made by Osem) is arguably the favorite snack food of the country. It’s a light, corn-based snack like cheese puffs, but flavored with peanut butter instead.

It’s addictive — but it’s actually nutritious, as it’s enriched with vitamins and contains no preservatives. Sure, it’s high in calories, but you’re going to need those, right?

Typically marketed as a snack for babies, because it dissolves easily in the mouth, it’s consumed in large quantity by adults as well, and helps explain why few Israelis have peanut allergies (a 2008 study concluded that Bamba can help prevent peanut allergies and even treat early symptoms of peanut allergies).

Okay, this may seem like a silly point, but: Bamba in Israel comes in two types of packages, pictured here. Both are in Hebrew with no English; one is a classic look, and one features the cartoony Bamba baby in a variety of poses. There’s an Israeli urban legend that they taste differently, but the contents are in fact identical. Be aware that there are flavored varieties, though…. Packaging outside of Israel differs….

A few knock-off brands exist, but we recommend the tried-and-true original by Osem. Try it here first: Bamba peanut butter corn puff snack (pack of 3, 3.5oz Bags)!

Price-controlled foods

When shopping for daily supplies, it’s good to be aware of certain grocery items that are considered important dietary staples. Often referred to inaccurately as “subsidized” foods, there are foods which are generally available everywhere, and whose prices are kept artificially low by government regulation. (The results are not always happy: at the time of this writing, there is a butter shortage in all of Israel because the major providers refuse to sell butter at a loss, preferring to export it to countries that will pay full price. And a few years ago, the threat of rising prices of cottage cheese nearly caused nationwide riots.)

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