Most of your diet comes from boxes and bags: shrink-wrapped blocks that become noodles and ground meat when water is added, dried sauce in separate cellophane with flecks meant to represent vegetables, smoothie powder. You don't mind it.

Re-hydrated meals have a limited range of flavors, but they remind you of childhood and the time your father bought several crates of military MREs at a flea market. He kept things like that around for the same reason he ran weekly drills with his hoary old luxray — "Just in case," said with a wink. You ate one under your bed with your pikachu plushie, unwrapping each inscrutable component with rabid fascination, and imagined yourself camping in a distant forest.

You've become an expert in repackaging meal kits for maximum efficiency. For example, the cardboard wrap is always the first thing to go. It takes up too much space, and even the lightest stuff can weigh you down if you have too much of it. Instead, you write labels and expiration dates on the cellophane in permanent marker. Sometimes you dehydrate your own food at a trainer supply store in town to save money (and you know folks who do it for their pokemon too, especially when preparing to travel through low-forage zones) but you prefer to skip the extra work if you can.

Even trainers who gripe about re-hydrated food have to admit to one truth you learned early on: most nights, you're so tired it doesn't matter what you're eating. After walking for miles with a backpack so heavy it bruises your collarbones until you eventually get used to it, after your pokemon accidentally singes off your eyebrows or tries to eat one of your other pokemon, after crawling through brambles chasing a gible that eventually gets away, after making camp and then immediately sitting on a stump and staring into the canopy for half an hour because you're too tired to move… anything hot tastes good. Or tastes like nothing at all.

What you do miss, almost to your embarrassment, are sour straws, poke-O's cereal, and especially cupcakes. Trainer meals are designed (yes, definitely designed and not cooked or crafted) with consideration for vitamins and minerals but not much else. They're uniform in color and texture. Every now and then a meal pack might include what's optimistically labeled as a "brownie," which is firm, dense, and dry. (It contains ten percent of you daily recommended iron and protein intake though.) It doesn't satisfy the craving. You lay in your tent at night fantasizing about your last birthday at home with the frosted funfetti cake. The luxury of sprinkles! You want cake so badly your stomach almost hurts from it.

When you finally arrive in Eterna City, you buy ten Hostess cupcakes at the first convenience store you pass. You plan to ration them out — and indeed, you start by pulling it apart and eating each layer slowly, licking icing off your fingers — but instead eat all ten in one sitting, wrappers spread around you on your hostel cot. The next day your stomach is so upset you reschedule your gym challenge.

You never eat another Hostess cupcake again — the smell alone is enough to make you sick.