I'm looking at my plates today for dinner and midrats and I see fresh strawberries, fresh asparagus, fantastic salad greens and I'm struck at how far everything we eat here is transported. We moan and groan about the C-17 not coming in, delayed by weather for at least 3 days, and how that means no freshies. They're a bit beyond their "best by..." dates, but oh how good they are after 4 or 5 days of none at all. The canned and frozen veggies grow old. The Christmas meal was the original destination for all of this and their delay hampered the cooks quite a bit, but the value of the morale boost of the meal was incalculable.
But imagine flying a LC-130 7-hours one way with all that fresh food! And then back when they couldn't land. I doubt that they were the only cargo items on the manifest, but the expense and the carbon footprint must've been immense. How expensive were those luscious strawberries in dollars and carbon? And how is that different from what you, the reader, do daily during the winter in your corner of the planet?
Much of the rest of the food comes down once a year in a ship from Port Hueneme, California loaded with all of the supplies for an entire year, including canned and frozen food, as well as motor oil, plywood and office supplies. The ship must maintain those frozen foods in a frozen state all the way down those thousands of miles and through the tropics. (On the way back north the ship retrogrades all the waste of the base. The food waste must likewise be kept frozen all the way, including through the tropics, to prevent a huge, stinking, rotting mess. Also retrograded is what they euphemistically call "cake," the sewage sludge from the waste treatment plant. I can't imagine the stench if the refrigeration plant failed!) All of this also has a cost and a carbon footprint, though pound for pound it must be a great deal less than that exquisite New Zealand produce. Is there nothing that they can't grow in New Zealand?
I stumbled across this blog in today's New York Times Science section. The author is a geologist out in CTAM, a remote field camp.
http://scientistatwork.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/27/life-in-the-deep-field/?ref=science
But imagine flying a LC-130 7-hours one way with all that fresh food! And then back when they couldn't land. I doubt that they were the only cargo items on the manifest, but the expense and the carbon footprint must've been immense. How expensive were those luscious strawberries in dollars and carbon? And how is that different from what you, the reader, do daily during the winter in your corner of the planet?
Much of the rest of the food comes down once a year in a ship from Port Hueneme, California loaded with all of the supplies for an entire year, including canned and frozen food, as well as motor oil, plywood and office supplies. The ship must maintain those frozen foods in a frozen state all the way down those thousands of miles and through the tropics. (On the way back north the ship retrogrades all the waste of the base. The food waste must likewise be kept frozen all the way, including through the tropics, to prevent a huge, stinking, rotting mess. Also retrograded is what they euphemistically call "cake," the sewage sludge from the waste treatment plant. I can't imagine the stench if the refrigeration plant failed!) All of this also has a cost and a carbon footprint, though pound for pound it must be a great deal less than that exquisite New Zealand produce. Is there nothing that they can't grow in New Zealand?
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| "Cake" |
http://scientistatwork.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/27/life-in-the-deep-field/?ref=science
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