McMurdo Station

To be fair, this is not a review for eggs Benedict. But I wanted to talk about polar eggs.

I spent two weeks at McMurdo Station in late November 2016, at a research base in 24-hour sunlight.

Nearly all of the food had been shipped in by boat the previous spring, either frozen or in long-term refrigeration. The very limited fresh foods were items that spoil fast and don’t ship well, like lettuce and fresh fruit. These arrive by C-130 Hercules, taking off from Christchurch, New Zealand, and landing on the ice shelf — the same way we arrived.

I saw other eggs on the trip: hungry and exhausted Adélie penguins crouched on their lone eggs in pebbled rock nests, dive bombed by aggressive skua wanting nothing more than the liquid protein of a raw egg.

We worried about causing an international incident when polar winds lifted part of our equipment sailed it into a group of nesting penguins (no penguins or eggs were touched).

To see a whole, uncracked and unprotected chicken egg in the polar environment of McMurdo was a minor miracle. The shipping and storage alone likely made each egg the most logistically complex, heavily subsidized and expensive egg I’ve ever tasted.

Cracked on a flat griddle, squirted with a splash of vegetable oil and then covered with a metal dome to cook. Watching steam escape around the edges of hemispherical dome and waiting for the eggs to finish, I was reminded of a frequent comment from the resident Antarcticans of this southern hemisphere: “If you shake the globe, the most interesting people fall to the bottom.”

The basted egg was improbably delicious. There was no hollandaise and I don’t remember the bacon or potatoes, but I happily ate it with toast. Perfection in context.

Two other memorable moments: Thanksgiving dinner with pecan pie in the cafeteria, and spam musubi at an impromptu meeting of Hawaiian-Antarcticans at the McMurdo fire station.