"We worked hard, ate heartily, and enjoyed life." This quote by Douglas Mawson, an Australian geologist who made several expeditions to Antarctica in the early 1900's, sums up my experience so far. Of course, he was eating seals, penguins and skuas, and we get an incredible variety of tasty food in the galley!
This morning Stacy and Nick dove at a new site near McMurdo. Each dive involves certain protocols for video-taping, still photographs, and sample-collecting. Then Stacy comes back and processes all her samples. Our dive tender today was Ben. Ben has been working here for three seasons and has had a variety of jobs.
Stacy and Nick fawn over Ben
You can tell that the divers really rely on the dive tenders!
Yesterday I was responsible for our "food pull" for our upcoming trip to New Harbor in the Dry Valleys. There are six of us and we'll be gone for 11 days. Most of us are cooking two different dinners so everyone on the team went through the list of available food and wrote down what they needed to make their dinners, and also what their preferences were for breakfast, lunch and desserts. Then I compiled the list and started "shopping". I made a giant pile in the food room.
I was so carried away with my nine-page food list that I totally forgot to take any pictures. So I went back today and took pictures of another group gathering their food.
Sal Consalvi and his food pull pile for the field
Peggy has to put a limit on 2 chocolate bars per person per day so you can calculate how many candy bars we took with us.
Food Math #1: We were allowed 2 candy bars/person-day x 6 people x 11 days. How many candy bars did we take?
Candy bar and Energy bar shelves in the Food Room
Field parties also go through a lot of nuts. Nuts are high in fat and have a lot more Calories per gram than either carbohydrates or protein, so nuts are a great energy food for working in cold weather.
Neoma Lavalle is packaging nuts from a giant barrel into baggies for the field
Food Math #2: If you eat 100 grams of nuts, and nuts have about 7 Calories per gram, how many Calories have you eaten?
It isn't uncommon for people here to eat 5,000 Calories of food per day here. The same person at home may eat only 2,000 Calories per day.
Nuts are high in fat and have good proteins in them as well
After the food is selected, Peggy scans everything so she can stay on top of her inventory. She gets most of her food once a year when the container ship comes in, so she can't just call in an order from New Zealand if she needs something.
Peggy working at her computer and maintaining her inventory
After everything is scanned, it gets packaged, weighed, and labeled. The helicopters have load limits so they need to know exactly how much all of our food and gear and we ourselves weigh!
Food Math #3: Our total food amount turned out to be 444 pounds. How much food is that per person per day? (6 people for 11 days!)
Boxes of weighed and labeled food
Answers to Food Math Problems #1 We took 132 candy bars! No wonder those candy shelves looked empty! #2 You ate 700 Calories of nuts! That is probably 1/3 of your Calories for the day unless you are in Antarctica! #3 We have 6.7 lbs of food per person per day. To convert that to Kilograms, divide the 6.7 lbs by 2.2 lbs/kg and you get 3 kg of food per person per day!
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