Not just any lunch sack, of course. Plante, who recently earned her master's degree from the University of Montana in health and human performance, is studying the lunch fed to wildland firefighters.
The study, federally funded, is being run through UM's Department of Health and Human Performance, which has a long history of studying firefighters' health, performance and nutrition.
“This is important stuff, because the way these guys perform can literally be a matter of life and death,” said Palmer, who is a former smokejumper.
Wildland firefighters expend an enormous number of calories a day, as many as 6,000, according to studies. It's easy to understand that those calories need to be replaced, but it's not quite as easy to make sure firefighters replace calories in an efficient way.
“The problem has been the traditional lunch and the way it's consumed,” Plante said.
The traditional firefighter lunch is huge, as many as 2,000 calories, usually delivered in the form of two entrees - most often protein-laden sandwiches - and a handful of snacks and drinks. The lunch, Plante said, could certainly be improved, but the issue is really more the way firefighters eat it.
Which is to say: all at once.
That would be fine, if all you were trying to do is consume calories. But firefighters need to work, and taking on a heaping load of fuel all at once is hardly an efficient way to send the body into battle.
“Firefighters are really like triathletes in terms of performance, but we don't feed them the same way,” Plante said. “Triathletes eat small amounts of food throughout their day, so that they always have something in reserve to call on. Firefighters have this huge surge in their blood glucose level at lunch, then they decline the rest of the day.”
It's not just inefficient; it could be deadly.
“It's not just your body that's affected by this,” Palmer said. “Your decision-making skills are also less sharp if you're running low, and you don't want to be in situations where you make bad decisions on a fire.”
Ideally, firefighters could be fed the same sort of diet that triathletes and other high-performance athletes eat, but such a program would be enormously expensive and perhaps not workable. Fire camps are served by large-scale caterers. In that setting, it's difficult to produce the fine mix of fresh foods and energy-laden bars and fluids that top athletes get.
“The fact is we're going to have to use prepackaged, processed foods in a lot of situations, but we're trying to provide the best choices we can given our limitations,” Plante said.
On both the Sawmill and Jocko Lakes fires, Plante, Palmer and a team of researchers have been working with firefighters to assess their attitudes about sack lunches, and to try out a new meal they're calling the “shift lunch.” They've also introduced a lower-calorie lunch - in the 1,000-calorie neighborhood - that's designed for management and camp personnel who have more sedentary days than firefighters in the field.
Working with Big Sky Caterers, which provides food to the fire camps, the researchers provided hundreds of re-envisioned lunches to firefighters, then surveyed them about their attitudes about nutrition in general and the new lunch program specifically.
It's been clear for a while that firefighters aren't nutrition experts. In a 2004 study out of UM, firefighters knew very little about their nutritional needs. They had little idea about the necessary mix of protein, carbohydrates and fats, and they didn't know much more about the benefits of minerals and vitamins. Firefighters were aware of the need to stay hydrated, but even then they were unsure about how much fluid to drink.
It's also the case that firefighters love their lunch break. The idea of taking a shorter break to eat less food strikes some as very nearly heresy.
“I had one guy get pretty mad about it, because he said we were taking away the one thing he had to look forward to in his day,” Palmer said. “It's a pretty ingrained part of the culture.”
It's not that Plante and Palmer want to turn the culture upside down. They don't want firefighters to eat less. They just want them to parcel their lunch out over the course of the day, so they have energy when they need it.
“If you eat your lunch at 1 p.m., and the fire gets really active at 5, then you might really not have the energy to be as productive as you need to be,” Plante said. “If you had something an hour earlier, though, some sort of carbohydrate, you're going to perform better.”
Based on a lunch provided to firefighters at the Jocko Lakes fire one morning last week, it's easy to see how a firefighter could parcel out the food over an afternoon. Inside the sack was: two chimichangas, wrapped separately; a bag of grapes; a sack of cashews; a fruit-granola bar; a small package of dried pineapple; a bag with Ritz crackers with cheese; a piece of cheddar cheese; an energy bar with chocolate chips; and two cans of juice, V8 and grape.
That's a load. A firefighter who eats all that at once will have a skyrocketing blood-sugar level, but might also feel lethargic. Then, as the afternoon wears on and the firefighter has no more food, he or she will feel less energized, be less productive and be less likely to recover from the stress of intense work.
“Just saving some of the carbohydrates would provide a burst of energy in the afternoon, which is often when the fires heat up,” Plante said. “Plus, with carbohydrates, your mood improves and you're likely to make better decisions.”
Plante and Palmer know the firefighter culture won't adopt lunch changes quickly, but they see a time when the new lunch program can go national. Firefighters have learned to drink often, so there's no reason they can't treat food the same way.
“If you drink frequently, eat frequently,” goes the researchers' maxim.
“That shouldn't be too hard,” Plante said.
Reporter Michael Moore can be reached at 523-5252 or at mmoore@missoulian.com
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