Preparation is (almost) everything

Over the last decade or so, I have taken up cooking as a hobby and immersed myself deeper and deeper into the art and science that goes into preparing tasty and healthy food. In that respect, I was astonished to read an article about a chef who can teach us all a lesson in how to plan, organise and execute a complex task under extreme circumstances.

Imagine you have to feed 100 people. Of these, 23 are vegetarians, two vegans, two people who only eat gluten-free, one person who only eats halal and two people who have nut allergies. What do you cook for them? And if that is not hard enough, now imagine you have to cook for them every day for a whole year. And did I mention that you can only shop for ingredients once a year? If you forgot something, or if you run out of an ingredient, you will have to wait for the next shopping trip in a year’s time.

Such is the challenge that Lewis Georgiades and his crew face at the British Antarctic Survey’s Rothera Research Station. The base is located on the mainland of Antarctica and staffed with c. 100 researchers and support staff during summer and about 20 people during the Antarctic winter. The station is so far south that in the dead of winter the sun does not rise above the horizon for two months. Also, it gets so cold that jet fuel turns into jelly and the station cannot be reached at all, no matter the emergency. The supply ship with the food for the coming twelve months arrives only once the ice has melted sufficiently in spring and Georgiades and his crew have to minutely plan every meal for the next 365 days. But they pull off what I would consider a miracle. Normally, you would stock up on tons of canned food and preserved meats, providing an extremely dull diet. Yet, these guys manage to provide three full meals plus two snack sessions each day. They have Sunday roasts, full-fledged Thanksgiving dinners and even Burns Night suppers with haggis and all. Their biggest meals of the year can run to twelve (!) courses. But Georgiades and his team manage to provide fresh fruit and vegetables year-round – arguably in an environment where freezing fresh fruit and veg is rather easy.

When the ship arrives, it takes the entire staff of the research station a whole week to unload the food. The food is then stored in several storage locations to insure not everything is lost in the case of a fire or any other catastrophe. After that, the job is about executing the plan for the year while always remaining flexible and ready to improvise if things go wrong. The weekly menu includes mundane dishes like burritos or fish and chips, but also “slow-braised beef bourguignon with caramelised onion mash, fine green beans and a bitter chocolate tart to finish”. And that apparently was a regular weekday night. They prepare duck breasts and cheese boards with fresh grapes, balsamic roasted beets and other delicious meals. In short, they make sure that the crew of the stations probably eats better than most of us in the “normal world”.

The success of Georgiades and his crew demonstrates how important planning and preparation is for the long-term success of any venture, while a lack of preparation and planning means that the venture will likely fail (in the case of the food in Antarctica, with potentially dire consequences). But at the same time, planning isn’t everything. One also needs to be alert to a changing environment in order to benefit from sudden unexpected opportunities. One day, a South African ship passed the British station and Georgiades managed to extract some antelope meat from them. Another day it was peanut butter from an American ship and another it was a couple of Magnum ice cream bars.

If you want to run a business successfully (or a country for that matter, though I won’t mention the B-word here), you could do worse than study the way Georgiades and his crew manage their “business”.

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