Butter Butcher
by John Huston
Packing meals for 4 people for 75 days is a lot of work. We do a ton of preparation in order to make eating and cooking as simple as possible on the ice. For the past day and half we have been weighing, counting, chopping, measuring, bagging, snacking on, and sorting all of our food.
At full rations we each will be eating over 7000 calories per day. All that fits into a package that weighs about 1.2 kg or 2.6 pounds per person per day. Fat is the main staple and it has to taste good. We are excited about our menu. It’s important to eat well, get enough calories, and enjoy the flavors.
Our daily menu.
Breakfast: freeze-dried dinner (Toby & John) or breakfast meal (Hugh & Kyle) with whole milk powder, butter, olive oil, and sugar – mix it all together in a fatty soup.
Lunch (eaten in snacks during the day): deep-fried bacon, homemade expedition fudge bars, mix of high-fat nuts, raisins/cranberries, sausage, butter, dried soup, and parmesan cheese.
Dinner: freeze-dried dinner with olive oil, butter, hot chocolate, and potato chips.
We pulled all of our freeze-dried meals out of storage in Resolute. The meals are leftovers from expeditions that during the past few years failed or brought up too much food. Digging the bags of meals out of storage felt like modern expedition archaeology. Since it is freeze dried and sealed it’s still good for us.
In total each person eats 150 g or 0.33 lbs of butter every day, that’s more than stick of butter. About two weeks into the trip our bodies develop a big hankering for calories and fat.
Despite this consumption we will all lose weight during the expedition, our energy output will be bigger than our calorie input.
We’ve been in Resolute for 3 nights now. The most likely weather window has us flying to Ellesmere Island on the early afternoon of Saturday, March 30.