Quick, what are you going to eat for the next six weeks?

 

That's the question we spent much of today answering in Peggy Malloy's "Food Room," upstairs in the Quonset hut next to the Berg Field Center. My tentmate Rob and I has already done some homework, planning menus and estimating how much chow we could expect to eat up during our upcoming six-week deployment on the polar plateau. There was considerable incentive to get it right: although we're expecting two resupply flights during our field season, it's not like we can just pop down to the grocery store if we run out of butter. And with the cold conditions and hard work, we'll need a lot of calories to stay warm and happy. It took us about three hours of quality time with the list of available supplies to come up with our ten page, single-spaced shopping list.

 

So this morning at 0800 sharp we reported to the food room, said list in hand, and started pulling our supplies off the shelves. Three 24-count cases of juice boxes, assorted flavors. Two 64-count cartons of instant oatmeal. Seventy-two chocolate bars, seventy-four beef jerky sticks, seventeen packages of pasta, eight one-pound bags of powdered milk, etc., etc., etc. All together it made quite a pile.  When we finished, Peggy came over with her barcode reader and inventoried the whole shebang in about three minutes.

 

Then it was time to put everything into our three large plastic "river boxes" for shipping. Shaun Norman, our mountaineer, recommended lining the boxes with plastic trash bags to protect the food from the inevitable "drift," tiny particles of snow that find their way through seemingly microscopic cracks and get into everything on windy days in the field.  We dutifully lined our boxes, and then began to load them. The pile of food looked quite a bit bigger than the boxes, but miraculously, it all fit. Victory! But of course, when we get to the field, the first thing we'll want will be at the very bottom of the box, and we'll have to dig it out with big clumsy gloves on. But that will be a story for a future blog.

 

Stan Love

McMurdo Station, Antarctica

2012 December 6