Food In the mining camps, food was expensive and low in nutrition. Because of that, hunger was common. If a miner didn’t get proper nutrition, he’d get malnutrition. When a miner gets malnutrition, he would get weak, mushy, and die from the inside out. The main foods in the mining camps were beans, salt pork, coffee, and flour for cooking because they were cheap. Flour was 800 dollars a barrel, eggs were three dollars each, a piece of candy was 50 cents, a pound of beans was 10 dollars, and a pound of butter was six dollars. So, as you can see, food was expensive and low in nutrition in the mining camps.