On the first day of March 1978, Tommy begins his 2058 mile thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail (AT). Thru-hikers on the AT make it a practice of choosing a trail name. Often such choice of name has special meaning for the individual, representing something important in their life. Trail registers are signed using trail names and many are only acquainted with others thru-hikers by their trail name.

As he continues walking north from Springer Mountain, the southern terminus, Tommy chooses the Wayƒarer as his trail name. He has begun his thru-hike carrying enough food to last for two full weeks, enough he believes, that will sustain him until he reaches his first mail and resupply stop 160 miles to the north.

However, in a short time, he realizes that his choice of sustenance is altogether inadequate for the high amount of calories being used daily on the task at hand, that of climbing mountains on a wilderness trail while packing a heavy burden.

The food supply in his burden becomes completely exhausted in half of the expected time and with still seventy miles before his first scheduled stop, he arrives at a small riverside town with a whitewater rafting outfitter. Here, he is happy to find that this outfitter has ample dried food provisions available for purchase.

Upon arriving at his first supply stop, Fontana Dam, North Carolina, he retrieves his supply box at the post office, which has contained in it food and other items he had previously mailed while he was in his home in Texas.

Then with his pack full, he begins the transverse of the Great Smoky Mountains but on the last day in the Smokies, he is beset with a horrible stomach problem, one which is to cause him much discomfort and misery throughout his thru-hike.

This problem gives him much concern because he is not sure what the cause of the problem is nor what will prove to be the solution. Thinking it has been cause by a pathogen, when arriving in the town of Hot Springs, North Carolina, he speaks to a health professional who after testing, assures him the cause is not a pathogen.

Nevertheless, the health professional does suggest and encourage him to carry and eat whole foods, particularly whole grains, nuts and dried fruit.

This change in his sustenance initially provides him with a necessary diet for the work at hand but repeatedly eating only primarily whole grains would later prove to bring on its own complications.

However, as the the work at hand, that of traveling on the mountain continues, he develops recipes to cook his food, which through trial and error, even creates some very enjoyable meals. He records the best of these recipes in his journal.

The pages which follow on this web site contained within A Wayƒarer′s Cook Pot, include what amounts to a wayƒarer′s recipe book, one which contains those recipes recorded on the pages of the very same journals mentioned just above.

The recipes in this recipe book are it divided into three chapters:

The three divisions have come to be periods of his life which he now calls the:

As his knowledge about sustenance and nutrition increases, he would make changes to the recipes and then record each of the new recipes in his current journal. When going back to read his older journals, he would find the recipes that he recorded there and would say to himself, That recipe has changed a lot!

Thus each of the three sections have recipes with the same name. However, if when you compare these recipe, you will notice changes have been made, changes which reflect the increasing knowledge he is learning about sustenance and the nutrition it has to provide.

For example, within each of these sections you will find a recipe for A Wayƒarer′s Fudge. Each section shows the ingredients of the fudge during each of the three separate periods of his live. Comparing these three three recipes may provide the reader with some insight about nutrition and the concept of how to eat healthy foodstuffs which provide the most nutrition for you and your family.

Throughout his life before this time on the mountain, Tommy always added pepper to his food and sometimes a little hot sauce. So, on the trail, he carries a zip bag of pepper. Soon after, he learns of the healthful qualities of some other spices so he also begins to carry a bag of cayenne pepper, then one of garlic powder and finally he adds a fourth bag of parsley. These become spices he is never without.

During the preparation of each meal, he would get out his separate spice bags, add some from each bag one by one to the food and then enjoy his meal. Sometime later, he asked himself why he was carrying four bags of spices when at each meal, he would always add some from each bag. Why not blend the spices, store all four in just one bag and thus eliminate some of the extra weight? ¹

As he progresses along the footpath, his primary food of choice comes to be brown rice. In fact, he develops a recipe for an evening meal, which later comes to be called the Repast, one that he continues to enjoy even now. The recipe for his Repast takes on new ingredients along the way and he finds it changing often due to what ever is locally available along the way.

For a Wayƒarer′s Backpacking Recipes, click on the above Backpacking link.

The original recipes that he would prepare and eat on the AT are called the backpacking recipes. Upon returning to a life away from the AT, there is suddenly a much larger choice of sustenance that he now has access to.

Later, when living in a home in the state of Washington, his recipes changes again due to having a stove and refrigerator. His meals would often include steamed vegetable and broiled chicken. He develops and refines his recipes for bread and other meals which he now calls his classical recipes.

He tries many different types of kitchen cooking tools, one that he used for many years was a Nutrawave oven which would allow excess fat from the meat he would cook in the oven to drip into a tray at the bottom. This fat became the source of the suet fat for the suet he would hang in feeders for his feathered friends.

For a Wayƒarer′s Classical Recipes, click on the above Classical link.

As Tommy approaches retirement and due to the fact that over the years, he has put on a lot of weight, he feels that he must needs eat healthier. For the longest time, he would tell himself that being overweight was just part of his family heritage, thinking this because most all of his sibling are overweight, some extremely.

Now, he feels that he needs to look once again at the type of food he is eating and like he did during his journey on the Appalachian trail, develop a new approach to what he is eating, one with a healthier perspective in mind.

Tommy begins with the elimination of processed foods from his diet, first and foremost: salt, sugar and fat. Too, he does research online to find out which foods are good for health and which are not and begins to compile a list for himself calling these: Foods to Avoid and Foods to Enjoy. As he continues to do research and gain more knowledge on his life journey, more foods are added and removed from his two lists, which continue to be updated. Too, he begins to use more fresh produce in the recipes he would create and he finds that he is loosing some of his excess weight he has been carrying. The food that he is now enjoying, he begins to call Living Food.

Still, people ask him What do you call this diet? He would reply, It is not a diet but a new life journey, an entirely new way in which we must needs learn to take steps upon. One in which we must retrain our minds to rid ourselves of the misinformation learned throughout our previous steps in life.

Still, his friends continue to ask him What is it called?, so he decides that it can be called nothing else but The Real Way.