Food Pull!

Hello Friends,

Today was another big day for us! We managed to complete our "food pull," which is McMurdo lingo for selecting all of your food from the McMurdo Food Room. Once gathered, we also succeeded in boxing and palleting all of the food and entering it into the McMurdo cargo system. A huge accomplishment! Just the food pull alone took 3 1/2 hours, not including frozen food.

Our basic strategy for calculating the food we needed was as follows. We're out for 240 person-days, or 40 days with six people. Breakfasts we determined would be cereal based (oatmeal or muesli, for example; see below) five days a week, and "special" breakfasts (eggs, bacon, or pancakes) two days a week. We also stocked lots of frozen and canned fruit. Lunches will be mostly snack food. Our lunch items include crackers, cheese, chocolate bars, energy bars, soup mix, jerky, peanut butter, GORP and canned fish. For dinner, we determined that we needed a starch and a protein source for each meal. We have two fish-vegetarians, so we'll be eating frozen salmon and halibut steaks, shrimp, tempeh, tofu, lentils, and canned beans. Starches include polenta, pasta, rice, couscous, and quinoa! We also included lots of canned and frozen vegetables. For emergency reserves, we ordered 84 dehydrated meals. This amount should be enough to feed us two meals a day for seven days in the event our flight back to McMurdo is delayed.

Here's what our day looked like:

Kat is fired up for our food pull!

Seth is also fired up!

This is the early stages of our food pull. Watch this pile grow!

The pile grows.

Our food pull was a frenzy of activity. Five of us were on task for three and a half hours. This table was where we stacked all of our baking goods, spices, drink mixes, and condiments. 

A view of our growing dinner and lunch piles.

Michael admiring all of the baking supplies Kat has assembled. We have an oven attachment we'll use with our Coleman stoves to bake brownies and other treats!

The drink mix calculations were tricky. How many packets of cider, hot chocolate, tea or fruit drink do you think you'd need for 40 days of field work in cold weather? We are bringing 100 hot chocolate packets, 140 hot cider packets, 480 tea bags, and enough fruit drink mix (Raro - a New Zealand delicacy) to make 80 liters. Try it hot! Delicious!

The growing breakfast pile. After recalculating, we determined we needed double the amount of oatmeal you see here, as well as additional grits, muesli and grape nuts.

We think we may be done pulling all of our non-frozen food at this point. I couldn't fit it all in the picture - an impressive pile still! The next step was for Food Room Director, Peggy, to scan all of the items. After that we were able to box everything up.

Patrick (AKA Gorp Man) helped to assemble our 80 bags of GORP. The Gorpmatic is Peggy's (in background!) invention. Patrick loaded the ingredients on the gray cart into the bucket, and then rolled the bucket using the wheels on the Gorpmatic - mixing the perfect proportions of GORP ingredients. Our GORP varieties included tropical, butterscotch, and standard.

We each get 1 bag of GORP for every three days.

We have three main categories of boxes: breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We have 7 of each category; each box is designed to supply us with approximately 5 days of the designated meal.

We have five other box categories: two drink boxes, two boxes of soup mix, one baking supplies box, one spices and sauces box, and a "Special" holiday box with stuffing, cranberry sauce, a can of Pringles and other improbable delicacies we think we might crave halfway through our field season.

Our two pallets of non-frozen food. They each weigh about 600 pounds! 

Packing a tri-wall (a three-layered corrugated cardboard box) with our frozen food. Our order included 30 halibut steaks, 30 salmon steaks, 8 pounds of bacon, 48 pounds of cheese, and lots of frozen vegetables, tortillas, bagels and butter!

We are relieved to have fit all of our frozen food into this box!

Greg weighing one of our food pallets. Each item of cargo is weighed, measured, and assigned its own cargo number. This process begins its trip to the Pensacola Mountains!

Phew! What a day! Tomorrow we're going to practice roped snowmobile travel, weather permitting. More from us soon. Hope all is well back at home,

Claire