Opening up yet another bag of Mountain House freeze dried food, I had to stop and wonder. Exactly how many of these meals have I eaten in my life?

I did a quick calculation: 72 during my North Pole expedition in 2006, 45 in 2008 during the Messner Route to the South Pole, 48 in 2009 for the Antarctica's Hercules Inlet Antarctica, 51 on the Arctic Ocean in March and April 2010, just 10 on Everest that same year (we ate 'real' meals in base camp)... Denali, Orizaba, the Cascades, Boundary Waters, Last Degree South Pole 2011, Cycle South 2012, late night snack. Quite possibly, I've spent a year of my life eating only expedition meals. Surprisingly, I still like them. Especially the spaghetti!

Packing them, on the other hand, is not quite as enjoyable as consuming them. To save weight on our journey, we remove the heavy vacuum packaging and then pour the contents of one or two pouches (depending on the calories that we need) into a light weight plastic bag. Next, we add 20-30 grams of butter - for extra calories (butter has one of the highest calorie to weight ratios of any 'food') as well as olive oil to the meals near the end of the expedition for svn more calories. Finally, we tie the bag in a knot and cut off the excess. Then all the bags go into a color-coded Granite Gear stuff sack. Green for breakfast. Red for dinner. Each breakfast and dinner, we pour the contents of the appropriate bag into our Stanely mugs, add hot water and... steaming hot cup of over 1,000 calories!

You see, in planning our menu we need to make sure our food is light, easy to prepare and has enough calories (in the right proportions of carbohydrates, proteins and fats) to sustain our daily efforts in the cold. Therefore, we are constantly searching for food with the highest calorie content. Of course, we can't survive on fat alone (which has the highest) so we mix have a diet that includes everything form salami to Skratch Labs mix, Cheese to to Clif bars and peanuts (well, macadamia nuts actually) to Pringles. All told, we will consume roughly 7,500 calories each by the end of the expedition!

We take extra pains to cut and chop as well. Sure we could save a lot of time by simply taking large blocks of cheese and other items, but I know of at least one expedition that was aborted simply by someone cutting themselves while trying to cut a frozen block of lunch cheese. Plan an expedition to nearly any other place on the planet and you will spend roughly half the time preparing.

We managed to finish most of our food prep and moved on to boot modifications after dinner. In Colorado, we both purchased discontinued OR Brooks Range over boots and cut out the bottoms. It took us about an hour to glue and screw them onto our very expensive Norwegian ski boots. My singular focus on making sure that each piece of gear specifically suits our needs has become a running joke between Ryan and I.

Still, we have cut down our mountain of a 'to-do' list by two-thirds and are tackling electronic gear and communication gear tomorrow. Until then, sweet polar dreams everyone. I hope it is snowing somewhere nearby.

Image: Ryan celebrating with devil horns the successful completion of cutting 100 pieces of salami and 100 pieces of cheese.