The Last Egg
brr.fyi
brr.fyi
Eating by the seasons is also pretty interesting, I think. It forces you to expand your gastronomic horizons, explore the cuisine of different regional cultures. Some cultures don't use milk (and thus cheese or butter), some don't use much oil, some are vegetarian while some are nearly all meat. There's preservation by fermentation, by drying, by salting, by burying, by sealing in hardened butter. Some just eat a lot of soup. There's really an infinite number of dishes that express flavor, aroma and texture. If you ever get bored of your food, you can fix that.
From a prior post [1], the no-flight period for the South pole is ~8 months, which really stretches the shelf life of UHT milk.
But more practically, there are different types of containers for UHT milk hermetically sealed to different extents. The more expensive kinds can last years. The US Military says 10 months for "normal" UHT milk stored under "normal" conditions [0]. The more expensive kinds can go much longer.
[0]: https://www.dla.mil/Troop-Support/Subsistence/Operational-ra...
Best by dates for shelf stable/frozen food are often not safety related, so the antarctic program just charges forward with whatever they have.
Maybe the UK is lagging behind on UHT? Or I'm just buying the wrong brand.
It's kinda wild it has as small of an impact on taste as it does. There's absolutely a difference, but it's surprisingly decent.
I personally think there's a big difference in taste, and I don't use UHT unless I really need to, but I'm sure that's partly just snobbery. You're right that it's perfectly OK for most purposes.
This seems to depend on the container as well as the brand / market segment.
"low end" Nielson / Sealtest / Beatrice in bags seems to last < 2 weeks, whereas stuff like Natrel / Lactantia / Nielson Truetaste in cartons seems to last around a month.
Generally everything is available in the USA, but there are some surprising cases where the default product is of noticeable lower quality than the default in Europe.
The yogurt is likewise amazing. You can get European or you can get Greek, if you don't want to pay for water. I get the plain stuff and again, it's got delicate flavors and odor, not the real tang of plain mass-produced yogurt. It's great to mix with my Muesli or just have a few medicinal tablespoons every day. In fact, it's difficult to stop once I've started spooning it out.
However, what would the mechanism be for increased inflammation caused by homogenization? Do you have a source? I'm not saying you're not correct, but I'm more inclined to believe that there is a hidden, highly correlated variable at play.
Both of us are lactose intolerant. God knows why he likes it and I don't.
By non-homogenized I mean straight from the cow, still warm.
https://www.tesco.ie/groceries/en-IE/products/250005606
It's essentially identical to whole milk in the US. Nutritionally, compositionally, and flavor-wise.
I really can't imagine what you're talking about "tasting like water" unless you switched to skim milk or 2% in the US without realizing it?
High-Temperature, Short-Time (HSTS) Pasteurization appears to be the standard in both Ireland [1] and the US [2] -- 71.7°C / 161°F for 15 seconds.
And I can tell you from personal experience that US milk goes bad in days as well, and has for decades. I don't know where you're getting the idea that it lasts a month in the fridge.
There are real differences in some foods between the US and Europe, e.g. American eggs are washed while European ones aren't. But fresh milk from the supermarket appears to be very much identical.
[1] https://ndc.ie/accordion/what-is-pasteurisation/
[2] https://www.usdairy.com/news-articles/why-is-milk-pasteurize...
I did find that US allows the use of hormones to increase milk production. Possibly that's a factor? But very difficult to tell.
I really don't know why the original poster claimed otherwise. Maybe it's just an urban legend in parts of Europe or something.
Perhaps it's the homogenization. Too aggressive perhaps?
Or maybe the comparatively poorer diet/aggressive production schedule?
Not that Im surprised though. The one thing I throughly dislike about the US (otherwise I love it) is the low foods standards. My local WF doesn't hold a candle to the quality of any grocery story in any country Ive lived in.
At 2% I would not even bother considering this product as a milk.
The other guy deleted his comment, but:
> it's 3.5%.
Thanks, I know, I say this about the taste and.. texture? At 2% it's just a watery fluid with a hint of milk for me. Back when I had milk in ny house I never bought anything with less than 3.5%, it was pointless for me.
I'm sure if I was using UHT every day I'd start to forget the difference.
I suspect this has to do with space and weight constraints, and probably a touch of old-school procurement practices.
In the not-too-distant past, basically everything was flown to south pole station, so weight was at a premium. Powdered milk weights a lot less than UHT milk. Now they do a traverse to the pole with sleds and tractors, so weight is less of an issue, but volume might still be.
On top of that, procurement may be slow to change. If, in fact, weight is no longer a constraint, it might take years for procurement to change to include buying UHT milk.
"To reduce the cost and increase the efficiency and reliability of transporting fuel and materials to South Pole Station, USAP established an overland traverse route from McMurdo Station to the South Pole. The traverse route is approximately 1,030 miles long and took several years of route-finding to prove and to mitigate areas with crevassing. This route is traveled by the South Pole Traverse (SPoT), a tractor train that hauls supplies and fuel using specialized sleds. SPoT tractors ascend more than 9,300 feet along the route to Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. On average, it takes 52 days for the round trip from McMurdo to Pole and back."
Ah yes, the Mountains of Madness pass.
(ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_the_Mountains_of_Madness)
Except that MMS to AMS is seven times the distance.
And those SPoT tractor trains are averaging less than 3 kph / 2 mph for the round trip.
Liquids could also pose stability issues in transit, from sloshing and the like.
Eating by the seasons is mundane and normal almost everywhere in the world.
Most American city-dwellers I know wouldn't be aware of in-season food items, and wouldn't care either, because grocery stores stock almost everything year-round, so if you're meal planning based on what's in season it's nearly an afterthought, or superfluous. Growing food in the desert and importing it from the Southern Hemisphere really works to blur those lines for us. When I was preparing fresh meals at home, I considered eating what's in-season and paying attention, but that turned out to be a lot of pointless work.
Good question. In my experience it's people who don't live in very developed countries plus people who shop at fresh food markets and countries that have a culture of not eating a lot of processed food e.g. in good part of Europe plus people who live in the countryside.
Let's say maybe 90% of human population.
https://cheesemaking.com/blogs/fun-along-the-whey/problems-w...
I've heard that you're more likely to have success with reconstituted dry milk than with UHT milk, but I haven't tried it.
And bad news is you can't really make decent cheese out of UHT milk, since the proteins have been denatured by the heat.
What I recall was him walking around and over the actual Pole and trying to get his GPS to register 90.0 degrees. It wouldn't go beyond 89.999.
I think this is the talk:
My Pole experience is a bit dated, but happy to chat about it. Blog from that is https://weaknuclearforce.wordpress.com/
(also, I dig the single-page latex resume format!)
I'll check out that blog, thanks for linking!
And yes: It was cold.
About food there were supplies almost every week as far as I remember, but I believe we got UHT milk.
I had the pleasure of watching an expensive drone crash into hull of a ship and sink into the ocean at the north pole for this exact reason.
yup. It didn't occur to me that it was on YouTube.
https://brr.fyi/assets/misc/gps-01.png
Very amusing to do a few "laps around the world" and watch the longitude go haywire.
I have always loved reading about people who live in extreme environments. It's also a great topic in science fiction.
Not sure how to explain my attraction to these stories, but as someone who lived for many years in the San Luis Valley ( https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/149599/san-luis-val... ) it's easy to relate.
Definitely want to spend more time there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Place_Further_than_the_Unive...
I was wonder why they don't have chickens somewhere so that they can have fresh eggs/meat/etc. It could potentially be a good way to re-use food scraps, although I'm sure they're already doing something useful with those.
It's probably a bio security thing. If these chickens escape into the wild there's the risk of infecting the local bird life with new diseases or viruses that the local population have no defences against.
Plus, scavengers would still be an issue with dead birds.
You would also bring value to the inhabitants of the base, so it's not just the gain in knowledge.
As far as I know, the only country to try colonizing Antarctica proper has been Argentina, with a small number of families settling at Esperanza Base (at the north end of the Antarctic Penninsula) and a big fuss made about the first kids born on the Antarctic mainland.
Chile maintains a little civilian settlement called Villa Las Estrellas on an offshore Antarctic island with similar motives as the Argentines. Everyone else just ignores this embarrassing rivalry.
As you note, there've been several births (Wikipedia states 11), with those listed being Argentine.
This is part of what I think of as the Martian fallacy, the idea that stuff that's hard to do on Earth somehow becomes easier on Mars.
We can't survive as a species with all our eggs in one basket (pun intended, given the context) where a single rock flying through space can wipe out all the gains of our civilization.
In the long term, this will require planetary-scale terraforming.
In the short term, this will require seasonal unmanned supply drops and so the experience will not be dissimilar to McMurdo and Mars Colonists will also be cooking their "last egg of the year"
In the medium term, I have to imagine we will have to conduct experiments with either developing livestock on Mars, or growing satisfactory animal protein replacements in a lab.
I don't know why people say this like it's a fact. It'd be cheaper to fix the planet. Even if it weren't, the moon is many magnitudes closer. Also, "terraforming" mars isn't even possible. Mars has no magnetosphere - if you managed to create an atmosphere at all, it would be promptly blown away by solar winds and radiation.
When people say the atmosphere blew away they mean over a period of millions of years. We can easily resupply an atmosphere every million years.
> Unwashed farm fresh eggs last for two weeks to a month at room temperature. After that, you must store them in the fridge. If you refrigerate freshly laid eggs, they should last for three to six months in an airtight container.
However, Americans have an obsession with washing eggs, which makes them not last as long. I wonder if they could get permission to have unwashed eggs.
I think there still an issue of cross contamination with things that don't grow on humans or objects, but love chickens in the air or incidental dusts.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Until one day that security setting breaks down.
The comical part of the food storage situation is that the station was basically built without anywhere near enough of it. The main "dry store" is in a room on a different level from the kitchen, labelled "Science Storage", and most of the near-to-hand frozen stuff is on an outside loading deck near the galley.
You only need enough freezer capacity to "warm up" the outside stuff to normal freezer temperatures (the article mentions this). This only depends on the warm up time, and number of people / consumption rate. Mission duration only impacts how much outdoor space is used.
It really isn't as simple as those "only" statements. There are other uses for freezers than warming stuff up to normal freezer temperature. The on-station food storage situation is a real hack. Shoveling snow off boxes of food in your too-small outdoor deep-freeze doesn't need to be part of the chef's job. Reading red printing on those cardboard boxes, is rather difficult under the red light that tends to be preferred outside in winter.
I think this would dramatically increase ventilation needs. How many people are on base? Remember, you're not even getting 1 egg per chicken per day. At that point, you're in the chicken farming business, not the science base business.
Also, how long would the chickens last with zero exposure to natural sunlight and cramped conditions? It could be hard on them.
Super low humidity increases the risk of ESD which wouldn't be fantastic for any electronics.
You'd need to walk around with a grounding strap all day otherwise you'll be zapping every bit of metal you encounter. I worked in a newly built data centre where the air conditioning (not the chillers) wasn't tuned quite right and the humidity dropped so low that we were being zapped left right and centre. So I'd love to see the actual figure they're using as "near-zero".
Given that there's a roughly 150F / 85C temperature differential from the inside (assuming ~70F / 20C interior temperature, and -70F / -55C exterior), and that it never thaws, this means frost/ice accumulation is probably a major structural hazard. Even if it was possible to humidify interior spaces, it might be avoided for that reason.
(I'm of course speculating, though based on discussion of PassivHaus designs in Fairbanks Alaska and the attention paid to moisture, vapour barriers, and frost accumulation, as well as an earlier article I believe linked to HN showing the cold food storage at ASSPS which included massive amounts of accumulated frost, and that I suspect just from moisture contributed by the breathing of occupants / workers within the cold (ambient) storage structure.)
I've heard of heat recovery on air exchange, but never humidity recovery.
I'm not sure to what degree water is readily available at ASSPS (yes, there's snow all around, but it's cold, and actual precipitation is low), but humidifying air is ... reasonably low-cost, modulo thermal budget for melting snow/ice in the first place.
Hard to measure at such low numbers. I have a handful of cheap consumer-grade sensors with me, and they all report "0%" or "lower limit" or equivalent. I can't share readings from official NSF-owned equipment.
Static buildup is a real issue. It's muscle memory now for me to ground myself before touching any electronics. There's makeshift grounding points (metal tape, metal frames, etc) everywhere. I'm still not used to the little shocks every time.
I humidify my bedroom at night using portable humidifiers. This takes ~1.5 gallons of water per night, which is deemed an acceptable use of water. Most people do this. I can get my room up to ~15% humidity with a reasonable amount of effort. The difference in sleep quality is noticeable.
Frost buildup is a real issue in humidified spaces, given the temperature gradient to the outside, even with triple-pane windows. The greenhouse has no exterior windows, so this isn't a problem.
The greenhouse is kept at ~25% relative humidity. It's the only place on station with infrastructure in place to provide humidity directly through the HVAC system.
> Static buildup is a real issue. It's muscle memory now for me to ground myself before touching any electronics. There's makeshift grounding points (metal tape, metal frames, etc) everywhere. I'm still not used to the little shocks every time.
I did wonder about that, and so it is a thing you need to learn to live with. As I'd mentioned in a comment below, I had the misfortune of working in a newly built data centre where the HVAC was still being commissioned/tuned that caused the humidity to drop severely in the rack zones. It was a right pain in the fingers being zapped frequently as we moved racks and other non-electronic infrastructure into place. But it was also comedic as well as you could regularly hear quiet yelps and expletives from others in the team as they too were being zapped :)
Before that I was optimizing for growing as much and as fast as possible. It’s fun but it’s a mess.
But then I remembered I'm reading an article about the last egg getting used up.
- Ambient temperatures too low for most fuels and lubricants, and out of spec for most other parts of the aircraft
- No hope of rescue if the plane goes down or gets lost
- No reliable way to light the runway. In the past they've used gasoline filled drums, but it can get so cold that the gasoline vapor pressure is too low and it won't light.
- Extreme isolation—there's really nowhere a flight can divert to south of New Zealand apart from McMurdo, which has its own problems
Remember that the South Pole station is just a small structure on top of a featureless high plateau. There are no paved runways, navigational aids, no heated hangars, no infrastructure of any kind to support aircraft arriving in the dead of night. The risk has been worth taking for urgent medevac flights, but no one is going to gamble with aircrews' lives over a bunch of eggs.
https://weaknuclearforce.wordpress.com/2013/11/17/up-on-the-...
The limit right now is how much diesel they want to waste. Imagine the alternatives!