What Concordia Crews Eat for 9 Months Locked on White Mars

At Concordia, the French-Italian station on the Antarctic plateau that Europe uses to rehearse missions to Mars, about a dozen people spend nine months cut off from the world. Their food is ordered a year ahead, dragged 1,200 km across the ice, stored in steel boxes at -50 °C, and cooked by one chef in a kitchen where water boils at 87 °C. They eat fresh bread every morning, pizza on Saturdays and seven courses on Sundays, and they still come home lighter. And somewhere on the shelf, a tin of mackerel from 1999 is still waiting.