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Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide to the fundamentals of better deer hunting, presented by first Light, creating proven versatile hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind First Light Go Farther, Stay Longer, and now your host Tony Peterson.
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Speaker 2: Hey everyone, welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundation’s podcast, which is brought to you by first Light. I’m your host, Tony Peterson. In today’s episode, you know, it’s just kind of a fun one about the foods that carry us through the long days on stand and in blinds all season long. Last week I talked about my love of Vedicon and how it’s a nutrient dent superfood that can’t really be compared to anything else meat wise, at least anything else that doesn’t live inside of a fence. Anyway. I love Vedicon because it’s healthy, but I also love things that aren’t healthy, like candy and snacks, the hell of a lot of stuff that’s just, you know, the total opposite of a superfood. I especially love this stuff during the fall, when I’m hunting like crazy. Now this might seem dumb, but I actually believe that once in a while, when I bring the right snacks into the woods with me. I kill it deer because of them. Allow me to explain that right now. Since the deer season for me is truly over in every way, I’ve been messing with my gear to try to sort it out and you know, find some semblance of order. This is a task I do every year with hunting and fishing gear. I don’t like it, but I do like the end result if I get to someplace that looks less like a disaster zone and more like Mark Kenyan’s carefully curated butterfly collection. This year, almost as soon as I started, I pulled two different one gallon ziploc bags out of a couple of my go to hunting packs. The contents of each bag look like if you handed a ten year old a credit card and cut them loose in a giant candy store. Now, in the interest of how we are all victims these days, and how I don’t want to take personal responsibility for anything, let me say this. I am a candy monster, but it’s not my fault. You see, if you drink a handle of jim Beam every three days for quite a few years and suddenly take that away so you don’t die, your brain starts looking for a substitute real fast. I didn’t know this when I quit drinking, but I figured it out not long after. You see, alcohol has a calming, relaxing, somewhat euphoric effect on your brain depending on how much you consume. It also increases your blood glucose levels, and this trigger is are released of that sweet, sweet dopamine. Dopamine just doesn’t make us feel good. It also cuts down on all of the static and our amygdala, the part of our brain that controls stress responses and some of our emotions. I guess a simple way to frame that up is that a lot of us addicts do what they do to numb themselves, and it works temporarily. Now, if your brain is used to that kind of thing and you take it away, it’s not going to give up without a fight. So much of what we have wrong with ourselves is just us fighting our biology, our evolution. And this is really no different for folks like me. Trading whiskey for milky ways is called a replacement addiction. That reward center in your brain that alcohol trips well, a whole lot of sugar in a short amount of time can produce a somewhat similar effect. Honestly, the only time I’ve ever craved sugar more than in the months right after I quit drinking was when I stupidly did the Keto diet for thirty days. When that broke, I made a huge bowl of ice cream with a bunch of toppings and ate the whole thing, And immediately marched back into the kitchen and made another huge bowl of ice cream with a bunch of toppings and ate that whole thing. Self control has always been a moving target for me. That’s one of the reasons I love just going a little nuts on snacks when I deer hunt. It’s a green light to not care. And honestly, some of my favorite memories of hunting with my daughters are about going to the grocery store before we headed out for a long weekend turkey your deer hunt somewhere, just letting them pick out a bunch of candy, a little Debbie snacks and chocolate milk and whatever else they want it, then eating those snacks for breakfast in a blind while listening to distant turkey’s gobble, or concentrating on the sounds of the forest while waiting to hear that most wonderful sound of a stick snapping because something bigger than a squirrel is finally on its way in. I think about this stuff a lot, and I don’t know if it’s a consequence of getting older or what, but it’s that little stuff that really isn’t so little that makes what we do so damn fun and meaningful. It’s one of the reasons that I have such a hard time filming ons. The whole thing is an exercise to weed out anything that isn’t immediately interesting or compelling, and essentially boils down days of effort into a sizzle reel design to work with YouTube algorithms. Look, there’s a place for that, But how it feels is not unlike how it feels if you ever try to learn to play guitar and realize that that sweet riff you love in some song is the most obvious part of a tapestry of notes and sounds that blend together so well you can’t really pick them out until you’re either really looking for them or someone shows you exactly how each instrument contributes to the whole thing. You know, that guitar riff that we headbanged too is the buck walking in, But the pace and drums and everything else that makes up a good tune is all of the non dear critters doing their thing, and the smell of the woods in the fall, and the feeling that once the sun starts to set, the scene is going to start humming with something intangible, and even if he doesn’t show up, it felt like he was going to, and that anticipation is so compelling that we keep going back, you know, like listening to a new favorite song and repeat. My daughter’s eating Swiss cake rolls at seven thirty in the morning while I dip a kitcat into some black coffee. Isn’t the same as the feeling of following a short blood trail to a spike in the big woods, But I wouldn’t want that without plenty of the other stuff. Now, I know that the current trend in the outdoors is, you know, fitness, fitness, fitness. It’s pretty hard to scroll through Instagram without seeing some jack dude shooting his bow without his shirt on, or some perfectly sculpted chick just finding a reason to shoot her bow and shorts that wouldn’t quite adequately cover a baby chipmunk. And man, I’m sure there is a joke there i’d make with my buddies, but I have to rein it in on this podcast. Any huski, you’ll never hear me say that you shouldn’t try to not only get in good shape, but stay there, because I believe it. It’s a cheat code of life. But you’ll also never catch me with a kale smoothie in my pack while I hang off the side of a tree all day long in my saddle, waiting on something to cruise through. The food that we bring with us shapes our experiences. I truly believe that. The crazy thing about it is we often carry foods into the woods that we really don’t want to eat, but for convenience sake, we just do it anyway. The first time that I went elk hunting, I did this in a major way. It was a long time coming, and I had spent a lot of time shooting and a lot of time at the gym, and I had worn out several pairs of brooks running shoes. I didn’t want to be left huffing and puffing at the trailhead. I wanted to make the most of it. I wanted to be like a Western hunter, so I bought packets of almond butter, and I bought supplements basically created daily food bags that had about thirty five hundred calories in them, but you know, didn’t weigh too much. By day three of roaming the Sangredee Cristo’s out in Colorado, I was absolutely sick of just about everything I brought with me, including the mountain house meals that I had never tried before. I drove eleven hundred miles to spend a week in the back country. I lost a lot of weight on that trip, and I thought about how I wouldn’t eat a packet of almond butter for any reason in my regular life. Ever, I don’t like it, and I really don’t even like peanut butter either, which is unfortunate because I had made bacon and peanut butter tortillas for my trip. I learned a lot about what I won’t eat even when I’m on a serious calorie burning trip. It was stupid, and my white tail hunting hasn’t been immune to this either. For quite a few years, a couple buddies and I did as many over the road hunts as we could, which usually meant just a couple each season. Now, at the time, it felt like a lot. But we don’t do that anymore, and I missed the shit out of it. Life gets in the way and jobs and all that stuff, and the willingness to live in a tent, you know, with your buddy, it’s just simmers down, but it never goes away. One of those buddies that used to travel with I’ll just call him Ryan because that’s his real name, is one of those people who, how do I put this, would frogger his way across an eight lane highway during rush hour to pick up a dime on the other side. Well, we made him the de facto snack guy for a lot of our trips because he wasn’t reliable enough to handle any of the meals. He always brought a flat of very low grade muffins, and, probably because he found them on sale or in a dumpster, a huge amount of cliff bars. Now, I don’t have anything against cliff bars or granola bars or protein bars, but he brought that same bag of cliff bars to multiple hunts over multiple years. It got to the point where, even to this day, a decade or so later, the sight, smell, or taste of a cliff bar makes me wish I had that kale smoothie instead, And as far as low grade muffins for breakfast, that’s a hard pass on that one too. You don’t want to bring food that you don’t want to eat on a hunt, because that just sucks. It takes something that could be a nice little reward and turns it into a nice little punishment. You don’t want that. You know why, because if you play this NAT game correctly, you might actually kill more deer because of it. I’ve talked about this some and I’m sure I’ve written about it a few times. But having some food as a reward throughout the day helps me stay and stand longer, to the point now where an awful lot of my hunts, I don’t leave the woods all day, even when it’s not the rut and I’m not sitting the same stand all day. I just want to be out there. But that takes enough food to kill the urge to leave and head to the cafe for a burger, back to camp to cook up something. This naturally means I eat a lot of sandwiches, and if you hunt a lot, you probably do too. Let me put it in another way, I almost never ever eat sandwiches at home because the amount of time I spend on the road is enough to get me my sandwich bix over and over. But man, the right sandwich on stand or while sitting on a river bank as you move spots can just change the arc of your day. I used to do pretty simple stuff, you know, a bun, some Mayo, cheese, meat. Now I try to get creative because if I have something I want to eat, it’s a bigger reward and it makes me happy to be out there. Look, I know that sounds dumb, but I’m telling you this and I mean it. We are constantly looking for reasons to not be in the woods, even when we can be. For me, the more I’m out there, the happier I am, and the more I fill tags, which also makes me happy. Little things like adding some bacon and maybe a tomato to a sandwich can make it so much better. I lived a bare minimum lifestyle for a long time in my early freelance days, but now I like to mix things up. In fact, one of my favorite ways to address a hunting sandwich issue is to grill up a whole backstrap before I leave and then slice it thin for lunch. Meat. There’s nothing wrong with store bought deli or ham or roast beef or whatever, but it’s not as good as fresh backstraps on a good bond. You know, maybe with some pepper jack cheese or something. I’ll make tortillas the same way, to mix things up, because even good sandwiches can wear you out after a few days. There are a lot of ways to make it a little more tolerable out there beyond good sandwiches too. You know, if you saw my North Dakota show that dropped a couple of years ago, you saw me eating peak refuel meals when I switch stands. That’s one of my favorite moments on a Western hunt, and I’ve started mixing them into my white tail hunts as well. A hot meal eaten midday in the wild and chase with a twinkie or some gummy worms is just a spirit lifter. I don’t know how to describe it any other way. It’s awesome and just not something most people in the white tail space even consider. My Western cooking kit comes along with me a lot these days. I’ll tell you that I’m cold mornings with my daughters when I make a batch of fresh hot cocoa for them. It has always brought us a lot more blind time than I deserve. So snack wise, you can make your hunts a hell of a lot more enjoyable, but there is a downside to bringing along a lot of junk food. I don’t know if this is intentional or not, but it feels like the big brains behind snack foods are also huge anti hunters, and their goal is to scare away all of the deer by encasing their sugary gut bombs in the noisiest wrappers possible. Seriously, just try to open up a pack of pop Tarts in your tree stand when it’s calm. It’s impossible. Sometimes I pre open my snacks and put them in ziploc bags, but a lot of times I’m just too lazy, and I tell myself that, well, if this is how they bust me, they earned it. That’s the potential tax I pay for bringing zebra cakes into my stand, and not something built with quieter packaging, like I don’t know, bananas or oranges. Now, the funny thing about this is that it’s just like when you’re trying to sneak through the woods with someone for whatever reason, I’m always super duper quiet and stealthy and very forgiving during the rare moments when I put all my weight on a dry stick and it cracks loud enough to spook birds out of the next section, or when I step on a rock in ravine and then it tips and clunks into another rock, which is a sound that instantly tells all prey animals within earshot that some big asshole with a bow is headed their way. Now, when I do it, it’s okay and just an honest mistake. When my hunting partners do it, that makes my blood pressure skyrocket instantly, even when it’s my own daughter’s, you know, and they have the subtlety of a drunken accordion player. The same rule applies to snacks. I had a cameraman with me a few years ago when we filmed the second season of One Week in November who for the first few days of the hunt where we posted up on public land in southern Minnesota, you know, where the deer weren’t very thick. But the pressure was brought along a couple of things that drove me nuts. The first was a giant metal YETI that he couldn’t not whack into everything metal that he found, and he was finding metal stuff all the time. But he also carried with him a really big bag of Starburst. Now I’m not against starbursts, I love them, but his strategy was to eat them only during prime time. And I’ll tell you what, it almost killed me. Actually know what, It almost killed him because I was staring at his safety strap thinking maybe I should cut it and just give him a shove. Now, look, I know it’s a dumb gripe, but when someone who has been two feet away from you all day waits until it’s absolutely prime time to root around in their pack for a super crinkly package of candy and then eats it next to you, you understand how every once in a while people just totally snap. I guess with tree stand snacks comes great responsibility, because the one thing you don’t want to do while you’re trying to make your all day sits a little more palatable is to get busted by a deer when you’re looking for a little sugar rush. You also don’t need to think of a this solely when it comes to all day sits. Like I said before, my strategy for maybe the last eight or so seasons has been to spend as much time as I can on stand. I love this when I’m hunting water tucked away somewhere because you can get a visitor at any time of the day. But I also love it when I’m sitting over early season food sources or whatever. We like to think deer move early and late until pre run. It’s just not true. Every couple of seasons I kill a decent one way into the midday, and man, is that rewarding. It’s also a hell of a lot easier to be there when my pack is full of stuff that I want to eat and drink. And I know it’s not as cool as a high level bed hunting strategy or something else, but it’s actually doable for all of us, which is no small thing. Spending more time out there as long as you have the wind right and you don’t have anywhere to be, is always a good thing. We miss this opportunity in the early in the mid season all the time because we think we shouldn’t be out there, but we should. And one of the ways to be there and believe that and at least give yourself something to look forward to, is to bring the right snacks, So eat those little debiesnam on some peanut m and ms, and shoot a thirsty buck at noon in September when the rest of the hunters are at home thinking there’s no good reason to be out there. And come back next week for some more ramblings, rants and ravings on this thing that we love so damn much. That’s it for this week. I’m Tony Peterson. This has been the Wired to Hunt Foundation’s podcast. Thank you so much for all of your support. Truly appreciate it here. I know you’re probably a little bored this time of year. If you need some more entertainment or some education on something, you might want to head over to the mediator dot com. We drop new films, we drop new podcasts, we drop new articles, new recipes, you name it, almost every day at that site. There’s so much content, so much good stuff, and not just typical how to kill a buck this way type of stuff too. We have a great new podcast we drop not too long ago by Jordan Sillers, who is a true journalist at heart, and it is called Blood Trails, and that dude is doing such a good job with them. It’s such a cool product to listen to. All you dudes out there listening and wondering why your wives watch murder mystery shows all the time like mine does. Listen to Blood Trails. Not only will you love it, but your wife might love it too. Great way to kill some time when you’re driving or whatever. Check it out, and again, thank you so much for everything.
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