trail mix

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Trail mix made from peanuts, raisins, and M&M's

Trail mix is a combination of dried fruit, grains, nuts, and sometimes chocolate, developed as a snack food to be taken along on outdoor hikes.

Trail mix is considered an ideal snack food for hikes, because it is tasty, lightweight, easy to store, and nutritious, providing a quick boost from the carbohydrates in the dried fruit and/or granola, and sustained energy from the mono- and polyunsaturated fats in nuts.

Both Hadley Fruit Orchards and Harmony Foods (two California growers) claim that trail mix was first invented in 1968 by two California surfers who blended peanuts and raisins together for an energy snack.^[1] However, trail mix is also mentioned in Jack Kerouac's 1958 novel The Dharma Bums as the two main characters describe their planned meals in their preparation for a hiking trip.^{[improper synthesis?]}

Other names

In New Zealand and Australia, trail mix is known as scroggin. The name scroggin is an acronym, taken from the first letter of eight ingredients: sultana grapes, chocolate, raisins, orange peel, ginger, glucose (sugar), improvisation or imagination (i.e., the chef is supposed to add a favorite ingredient), and nuts.^{[citation needed]}

The word gorp, an alternative name for trail mix, may stand for "good old raisins and peanuts",^[2] "granola, oats, raisins, and peanuts", or "gobs of raw protein". These are probably backronyms or folk etymology. The Oxford English Dictionary cites a 1913 reference to the verb gorp, meaning "to eat greedily".

Trail mix is known as studenterhavre ("student's oats") in Denmark, studentenhaver in the Netherlands and Studentenfutter ("student's food") in Germany.

Ingredients

Common ingredients may include:^[3]

• Nuts, such as cashews or almonds
• Legumes, such as peanuts or baked soybeans.
• Dried fruits such as cranberries, raisins, apricots, apples, or candied orange peel
• Chocolate: chips, chunks, or M&M's
• Breakfast cereal
• Seeds, such as pumpkin or sunflower seeds
• Granola
• Carob chips or banana chips
• Shredded coconut
• Pretzels
• Ginger (crystallised)

References