Food Waste

Welcome to a stream of my consciousness.

I climb on top of old pee drums, full of urine from the past years and many, many people who spent time in the field before—the Taylor Valley, to be exact. I climb on top of them so that I can move bags of trash back and forth. Not just any bags of trash. This is old food waste, for that matter. Plastic bags, double-bagged, full of food that’s been taken here, flown across the Ross Ice Shelf, and brought down. It sat in the fridge or freezer for a while, and then it got a little bit too old to eat, so it went to go sit in a bag, to sit in a box, to sit in a yard.

To sit in a yard that’s going to be there for about two years, and then it’s going to be shipped off again, probably on the same helicopter that it came on, back to station. McMurdo Station. It’s going to sit there for about another two years. It’s going to stay frozen and might thaw on the warm days, but the cold, cold winter days will do it justice and keep it frozen for... well, about two more years. And then from that, it’s going to get taken on a loader, probably a Caterpillar IT28, and get taken down to McMurdo Sound, where it’s going to get loaded onto a big boat.

That boat is going to come with supplies to last us two years—maybe even more. We’re going to ship off all of our trash, and it’s going to go across the Pacific Ocean. From there, it’s going to go through the Drake Passage, the most dangerous body of water in the world to cross. And after the Drake Passage, assuming they make it, it’s going to go to California to sit in another yard for about two more years.

Quite frankly, I don’t know what happens to it after that because that’s in California, and I’m not in California. However, I do know that the people of California buy our poop. They buy our poop for fertilizer. I’m assuming it’s the ones from Orange County, where they like things a little bit more delicate. But if they knew that this poop came from Antarctica, would they pay another dollar? Do you think they know that our poop sits there, sits in a building, and when we eat tomatoes, the tomato seeds pass through us and also sit in this big barrel—this big building of poop—and the tomatoes sprout?

The tomatoes sprout and make a little dash of green inside a big ocean of brown, and grow and grow and grow until they can’t grow anymore without light. By that time, when they would see the light, it’s now going to be winter here. Winter doesn’t get any daylight. In fact, it’s going to be dark for about five months. And that is okay because the tomatoes will go away, and then we don’t have to deal with a tomato growing out of poop anymore.

Rather, it’s going to be summertime, and we’ll have to deal with other things, such as making more pizza for people. The supplies for the pizza came on the ship that came across the Drake Passage, which came through McMurdo Sound, which landed here, which the loader picked up and brought to the kitchen. And somebody was hired to cook that extra pizza so that everybody else could be happy, with the supplies, the ingredients, and the time that went into making them this cheesy delight.

I’m thinking all of this while I move trash from one box to another, sorting out years of food waste that has been brought here before me—and that I will likely leave the same thing behind. And I do it with a smile.

And I do it with a smile because I can look up and see the standing lenticular clouds growing over Mount Erebus, which, in fact, is the southernmost active volcano in the world. I saw a magazine this morning, which I flipped through, and it was about the natural phenomena of the world. Quite interesting. However, I’m just moving food waste right now, so I’m going to focus on that so I don’t fall off these drums that came from the Taylor Valley on a helicopter that came to us here to sit in this yard so that I can climb on top of it to move the trash that came from the people before me.

And the people that came before me did the same for the people that came before them. And the people that come after me will do the same for the people that came before them, which is me. So, I don’t really know what I’m trying to say here. All I’m saying is that I’m moving bags of moldy trash with a smile, and I don’t know exactly why. But I am happy. I am happy to be moving bags of moldy trash from one box to another.