Foood, Glorious Food!
Don’t it
always seem to go,
That you
don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone.
They
paved paradise, to put up a parking lot.
-
Joni Mitchell, Big Yellow Taxi
Joni
Mitchell was right. You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. That’s why
Tuesday, June 7 was such a sad day for us here at the pole. It was the day the
last egg ran out.
I’ve often
been asked friends and family about how we eat here. Besides the obvious answer…with a knife and
fork, just like at home…the food has been more than a pleasant surprise. Someone here long ago learned the lesson that
if an army marches on its’ stomach, then Polies thrive on theirs.
Our Galley
Staff includes a chef, a sous chef, a baker, and a couple of stewards. As befits the Island of Misfit Toys we call
the Pole, each has a background story all their own. The chef is a graduate of the Culinary Institute
of America who got tired of the restaurant business, joined the military and
served as a Corrections Officer in both Leavenworth and Guantanamo Bay, and got
back in the kitchen as the chef for NSF installations in Greenland and at the
Pole. This is his third winter here and
his seventh time “on the ice.” The sous
chef has a restaurant background, but also worked as a Personal Assistant to
celebrities visiting his home town. Our
baker has spent time at McMurdo Station on the coast and at Palmer Station on
the Antarctic peninsula, as well as in upscale restaurants in places such as
Martha’s Vinyard. One of our stewards is
a professional blogger; the other has been a world-traveling evangelist. You know, because we don’t fit in anywhere
else.
The food is
really good. It would be easy to simply
throw something in the deep fryer every day and put it out on the line. We’re a captive audience, so we would have to
eat whatever was there. (Including the
rather suspicious-looking multicolored hot dogs. No option for Door Dash at the Pole.) But that’s not what they do. There’s are a wide variety of meals, and lots
of ethnic food; I’m especially fond of the Ethiopian cuisine, complete with injera
bread. Every meal has allowances for vegetarians
and vegans as well. To some extent, it’s
still relatively heavy large-scale industrial cooking without much subtlety to
it...unavoidable when you’re cooking for 43 rather than plating a dish for
one…but given that constraint there’s no complaints and lots of praise.
The galley
staff also tries to accommodate us as much as possible, even when we don’t
specifically ask. I had mentioned to our
baker just before the Jewish holiday of Passover that because I could not eat
leavened bread during the festival, I was not going to be able to eat any of her
tasty treats for a week. The next day, a Passover meal showed up with brisket
(granted, it was Texas barbecue brisket, but it’s certainly in the
neighborhood), freshly made matzah, charoses just like my Dad would make, and
homemade matzah ball soup.
(Charoses is
a mixture of apples, nuts, and wine that is symbolic of the mortar and bricks
used by the Israelite slaves in Egypt to build things like houses and temples
and pyramids. You can eat it between a
couple of pieces of matzah like a sandwich, or just scoop it form the
bowl. It’s great stuff. I specifically mentioned that the matzah ball
soup was “homemade” because at our house we don’t lovingly grind up the matzah
into a fine meal but simply empty the Manischewitz package into a bowl with
some egg and cooking oil. It’s kind of
like the time my sister threw a Channukah party for her friends and they asked
how “Real Jews” make latkes, or potato pancakes. Her answer?
“We open the box.”)
Our baker
also knows that my favorite snack is Toll House cookies but with M&M’s
instead of chocolate chips, so most nights there are some M&M cookies laid
out for my midnight snack which I chase with a glass or two of fake milk. I would like to say that she does this just
for me because I’m special, but she makes accommodations like this for everyone
because she’s just a good person. She also knows music cold, which is why I was
delighted that she and I wound up on the same trivia team (“The Waffle House
Gang”). We’re 2-0 so far this season,
most recently having trounced Team Kindness and Boss Asian and her White Boys.
(Pro
Tip: Complimenting a baker is about the
only time you can tell a professional woman you love her cupcakes, buns, or
muffin without getting reported for sexual harassment.)
There’s also
a tradition that on your birthday, if it’s at all possible they’ll make
whatever meal you wish. The only request is that you don’t be a jerk about it. (There’s
a story about how one year someone wanted a certain kind of pizza for their
birthday, but didn’t want the galley staff to make any other kind of pizza for
anybody else.) However, because I hate
birthdays, I will not be making a celebratory request. A birthday is simply another indicator of my
mortality. I didn’t always hate
birthdays, but #37 did me in. I’m a John
Mellencamp fan, and one of my favorite songs of his is called “The Real
Life.” There’s a lyric that notes, “It’s
a lonely proposition when you realize, that there’s less days in the front of
the horse than riding in the back of this cart.” At the time I first heard the song, the
average American male lived to be 74, so 37 was halfway done. I’ve been depressed about birthdays ever
since.
Of course,
that doesn’t stop me from accepting presents.
It would be rude not to accept them, just as it would be rude not to
suggest what a great present might be. And the Best Girl Friend Ever always
decorates the dining room table and makes my favorite birthday meal (beef tips
and noodles in the crock pot), along with a Baskin-Robbins ice cream roll with
chocolate cake wrapped around mint chocolate chip ice cream. Sometimes the cake
is shaped like a monkey, which does in fact brighten my day. We also have
traditional birthday songs, one specifically in tune with my feelings about
these anniversaries:
Happy
Birthday. Ugh!
Happy
Birthday. Ugh!
Hate and
sorrow and despair.
Gloom and
misery everywhere.
Happy
Birthday. Ugh!
Happy
Birthday. Ugh!
One day
closer to death!
Paradoxically,
hearing the BGFE sing (I think that’s what she’s doing) this recitation of woe enhances the joy I
derive from the beef tips and noodles and the monkey-shaped ice cream cake and
helps to relieve my annual depression, which is also lightened if there’s some
sort of Lego product among my birthday gifts.
But since the BGFE is not here to provide the requisite birthday
consumables or sing the traditional dirge, I will not be letting my colleagues know
the exact day when I transition from having five years until I get Medicare to
four.
**********
So just to
regroup from that distraction, the food is really good, albeit with some unique
twists based on whatever’s frozen in storage. It’s especially noticeable with
Indian cuisine. Last week we had turkey
tikka masala. While chicken tikka is
pretty well-known, the turkey is not one of the predominant avian residents of
the Indian subcontinent. Ditto for pork
vindaloo. (I use the recurring
appearance of pork vindaloo as an excuse for violence when I’m writing trauma
patient scenarios for medical training.)
Besides the
unusual but flavorful combinations of whatever’s down in the ice, there are
other little quirks to the food here.
One that I find strangely endearing is that if anything comes in a
sealed bag like potato chips, the bag is all puffed up like a balloon. As we’ve talked about with Boyle’s Law, a
volume of gas will expand when the pressure upon it falls. So at the higher altitude (and lower
atmospheric pressure) of the Pole the gas within the sealed bags expands, and
the sacks of chips and snacks get puffy like a very airy Cheeto, and instead of
merely peeling apart the top you want to squeeze them open with a loud,
satisfying BANG.
(For the
record, the puffed neon orange Cheeto is the only valid kind. And you should know that Cheetos are also
helpful in clinical diagnosis. When the
patient says they are vomiting and can’t eat or drink, yet they have Cheeto
dust on their fingertips, you know something’s not quite right. We call it “Chester’s Sign.”)
I’ve also
learned why cake mixes and bags of flour often have high-altitude baking directions
on the side of the box. The boiling pint
of liquids is lower at altitude, and the dry air promotes evaporation as
well. As a result, baked goods tend to
dry out, and more liquids are often added to a recipe and the tasty treat baked
in a hotter oven for a shorter period of time.
And with the expansion of gases that happen on ascent, doughs rise
faster and in an irregular fashion, which can break down the structural
integrity of bread or cake and cause it to fall like an unfortunate souffle.
**********
What the
galley folks have to work with is seasonal.
I was on station for the tail end of the summer, and at that time you could
have a fairly normal diet because fresh food is continually flown in. Winter is a different story. The fresh milk is gone in about 10 days after
station close, replaced by reconstituted “milk solids.” (The last glass of fresh milk I had was in
February, a reward for helping to store the final load of “freshies” into the
cooler.) The stock of fresh fruit is
gone by early March; the vegetables last a bit longer, but by the first week in
May all that was left was a bag of green peppers that seemed a worse for
wear.
We still do
get some fresh food from our hydroponic greenhouse on the first floor of the
Station. The greenhouse is a great
place. It’s warm, humid, and smells like
things fresh and living. There’s a small
anteroom where you can sit in comfort and look into the tangle of greenery
inside the growth chamber while being bathed in the aroma of fresh flowers in
bloom. I don’t spend enough time
there. Nobody does. Everyone should.
The
greenhouse is the domain of the Vampire Engineer, a small, dark character who
seems to work only at night. I
volunteered to help in any way I can, because I think it would do me good to be
around the plants. But there were
already plenty of volunteers held over from the summer, and I think the Vampire
is a bit territorial about it as well. That’s
probably a good thing where I’m concerned, as there’s every chance that I would
pour the wrong nutrient into the wrong solution and either kill everything or create
something like Audrey in Little Shop of Horrors. If I’ve had any influence on the greenhouse
at all, it may be that they’re growing a lot less kale since I let everyone
know that kale is part of Satan’s Vegetable Axis of Evil along with asparagus
and brussel sprouts.
I am allowed
to help with planting, so every Wednesday I go down in a soak a couple of
blocks of what seems like compressed plant fiber in some deionized water, take
a package of seeds and use tweezers to put one seed in each of six holes within
the block, and stick a little flag in to saying what it is and what day it was
planted, and place the block under a lamp.
About half of these plantings will sprout, and then be placed into the
garden racks to enjoy a chemical bath until harvest time. I understand that normally that we get about
one side salad per person out of the garden each week, but it seems like there’s
a special abundance this year. Sometimes
we have fresh salads two or three days in a row. (The closest thing Ilve seen to a fight is
the aggressive jostling to get at the greens.)
We even got some pickles out of cucumbers I set up in March. Probably has something to do with vampire
powers.
Just about
everything else we eat is frozen or reconstituted. Food is kept under the ice in the Logistics
Arch (which for some reason is referred to as the LO rather than the LA,
perhaps to avoid confusion for those Golden Staters among us or, for a guy from
North Frorida, with Lower Alabama.). The
arch is a large metal corrugated building that resembles a military Quonset Hut. It was initially built on ground level, but
is now covered by snow and ice and is essentially underground. It’s full of storage racks holding all kinds of
consumables and other goods that can be frozen, as the year-round ambient
temperature in the arch is about – 50 F.
It adjoins similar arches that contain our fuel tanks, which is why
sometimes food products surprise the diner with a flavorful dash of hydrocarbons
to tickle the palate. This is especially
true of the ice cream, where you learn to scoop from the middle because the
cardboard barrel seems to soak up more of the fuel taste around the edges.
Inside the LO there’s a smaller heated building for things
needing storage that can’t be frozen called, appropriately enough, the Do Not
Freeze (DNF). The DNF (Official
Mascot: A penguin inside a bright red
“NO!” symbol) is where supplies are brought in and unloaded, and where pallets
of waste are constructed prior to storage in the snow berms outside the station
and eventual transport off continent. It’s also where the Supply folks hold their
parties and movie nights, the working bay festively adorned with a banner that
reads “Welcome to the Underbelly.” Theres
a lot of cornhole played in the DNF as thirsts are quenched with adult lemonade
slushies. Last week they built a ping-pong
table that we all signed prior to putting on the last coat of shellac. As nothing here ever seems to get thrown
away, there’ll be a remnant of our stay here forever.
**********
The one downside is that the cuisine tends to be somewhat
repetitive. Halfway into the season,
we’re starting to see some of the same meals appear in rotation. In the absence of “freshies,” the dishes are
increasingly protein and carbohydrate heavy, like classic “comfort food;”
frozen vegetables and canned fruit can only make up so much ground.
Despite the rich diet, many of us have lost weight without
really trying. I’ve always been kind of
a stick person, but I came in at 165#, and now I’m down to 153#. It's true that I’m exercising more than usual
and I’ve noticed I’m eating smaller helpings of main courses and more soups
than before, but the easiest explanation is physiology. At sea level, your basal metabolic rate (BMR)
burns up to 80 calories/hour. That may not seem like much, you can use 2,000 calories/day
by simply watching TV. At altitude, BMR
can increase more than 25% before settling back down over time. Given that American women burn 1,800 - 2,400
calories daily and men use from 2,400-3,000 each turn of globe, if you eat
reasonable meals in the course of a day your baseline needs can easily exceed
your intake. Add in some mild exercise such
as climbing up and down the 96 steps in the Beer Can or walking across the
frozen landscape to work, and there’s no need to send a check to Weight
Watchers or Jenny Craig.
**********
The galley crew produced a four-course menu. Our Sunset Dinner featured a selection of appetizers, a starter of sweet potato soup, two mains, one of poached lobster with greenhouse lettuce and the other braised beef short ribs with potato mash and sauteed greens from the hydroponic garden. Dessert was a carmelized white chocolate panna cotta. Not bad when the only fresh foods were the salad and greens.
(I’ve come to understand that with the cost of transporting food to the Pole, adding up the food purchase, storage, airframe and engine time, and the stipends of Air Force Reserve and polar staff, the difference in price between eating peanut butter and lobster is negligible. Still, we have lobster only on special occasions. Not a good look for the beancounters nor the taxpayers.)
Each course was preceded by one of the crew coming out to review the menu. I will confess to having flashbacks to the movie The Menu, where Chef Ralph Finnes would come out of the kitchen and introduce a course by inviting his sous chef to shoot himself in the head in the head (he did) or by getting stabbed by an employee (he was) prior to dressing up his patron like s’mores and setting them on fire (they were). I kept looking to see if any of our fire team had donned turnout gear before dessert.
Each dinner has it’s own character. The Sunset Dinner was really the winter crew’s first occasion to come together as one and understand that not only are we are in a unique place and time, but that we’re all in this together. That feeling is reinforced by the assignment of a “Pole Number” at a brief ceremony just before dinner. The Pole Number is a big deal. It’s your rank over time of all people who have over-wintered at the Pole. Mine is 1697, so including me less than 1700 people in the history of mankind have ever spent the winter at the South Pole. It’s your “street cred,” and if asked your number someone will instantly know if you’re truly a “Polie” or are just blowing smoke from your answer. (Or frost, as the case may be.) I’m having mine engraved on a ring.
The formal Mid-Winter Dinner comes up this weekend. There is only one holiday celebrated by everyone on continent, and that’s Mid-Winter Day (the Winter Solstice.) The shortest day of the year in most of the world but just another 24 hours of night in ours, the day marks the midpoint of the perpetual darkness and heralds the coming of sunrise in several month’s time. Everyone on continent sends greeting cards to each other, and shares pictures of their station and crew. One wall of the galley is festooned with salutations and good wishes representing six continents of the world, and we’re all on the seventh.
The Mid-Winter Holiday is a major occasion, and not just because of the food. It represents a true turning point in the Antarctic year. The work of preparing the Station for winter has been completed, and the effort of getting ready for summer is still months away. With less activity, increasing isolation, and perpetual darkness, the mental and emotional stress rises on us all. (One of the informal mottos of Antarctica is “It gets worse before it gets worse.”) It’s going to be a rough few months until the onset of twilight and the anticipation of sunrise brigihtesn our mood and sets us back on an even keel. So Mid-Winter is a time to reflect and regroup, to marvel at where we are and the community we’ve built; to recognize that our time in this special place is limited and we’re on the downhill slope.
(There’s a tradition the after the Mid-Winter Dinner that we all watch “The Shining” on the big screen in the gym. I’m likely to pass on that. First, I don’t enjoy horror films. Second, if I want to hear someone say, “Here’s Johnny!” I’ll watch some old clips of The Tonight Show. And last, I’m afraid that my mischievous side might be motivated to take some ketchup and spell out the words “Red Rum” on the bathroom mirrors just to see what happens, which would likely end with me being placed in my own straitjacket. I don’t look good in white.)
For many of
us, the Mid-Winter Holiday signals that the countdown to departure has already
begun. Some are feeling the monotony,
some the workload, some the confinement and isolation, some the lack of
structure. Everyone misses home in their
own way, and I’m no exception. I miss
the BGFE, I miss my kid and my parents; I miss being awakened at 5 AM by a trio
of dogs that insist on randomly barking at the air. When things go wrong, no matter how capable
others may be, I feel lost that I’m not there to help, not holding up my end of
the deal because I’m stuck at the End of the World.
There’s also
an objective reason for counting down, and it’s that I’ve already done most of
what I wanted to do. I’ve not just been
to the South Pole but lived it. I’ve
seen what I wanted to see, and while there’s always more to learn as the year
goes by (like how to drive a snowmobile and not plow down a walrus), my South
Pole Bucket List is almost full. I really
enjoy being here and spending time with my new friends, and in many ways it’s
still like living at Summer Camp. But
I’ve learned the lesson I needed to find.
Adventure is everywhere. Every moment is new and unique, a point in time
that never was and never will be again. Miracles are all around, in all
sizes. Peace and contentment are not in
the grand gestures, but in the smallest things.
I needed to come here to find that the adventure I sought was right
there all along. Now I want to be home
to find the joy I’d been too blind to see. You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone.
Comments
Post a Comment