Cooking for 400 people, 9 miles out to sea

I've spent my past two summers living and working on Star Island, located 9 miles of the coast of New Hampshire. Over the summer, Star Island plays host to over 20 conferences of varying nature and size, but that all have at least one thing in common: they all need to eat. Conferences on star island eat three family style meals a day in the dining hall located in the Oceanic Hotel (pictured below). Star Island staff, endearingly called "Pelicans" perform all of the transportation from the main land, storage, preparation, and service of food on star island.

Star Island has always made sustainability and self-sufficiency one of its top priorities. It is no secret that food transportation, preparation, and disposal is one of the top inhibitors of this goal. It is extremely work and fuel intensive to transport enough food to feed over 400 people out to the island every few days. Most everything on Star island is done with minimal technological help. To get a sense of what I mean, take the transportation of food to the island as an example. Every three or four days, a few pelicans take a boat over to the main land where they manually haul all of the food (roughly enough to fill a large box truck) onto the boat. Once they arrive on the island, they must transfer all of that food from the boat to a truck. The pelican community always helps with this step, forming a "food line", essentially a hot potato chain of people snaking from the boat to the truck. Once they are done loading food onto the truck, everyone shouts "halfway!" and round two of food line is performed after the truck is driven up to the kitchen loading dock.

I would like to highlight one feature of Star Island that is a relatively new and very exciting development in the realm of food and sustainability on island: 

1) The Pelican Garden

                      

The Pelicans have worked tirelessly over the last 4 summers to create a garden on the island. Prior to this past summer, the garden was maintained using purely volunteer labor. All structural components of the garden (garden beds, greenhouse structure, plot borders) There is a garden bed made from an actual old bed frame, tomato vines grow on old pieces of scrap metal, and there are flower planted in old toilet bowls. The walkways are bordered with old glass bottles (they are not hard to come by, especially after a staff party). The Pelican garden is both beautiful and resourceful. All compost from non-cooked food on island is saved and use as fertilizer in the garden although compost from cooked food is still sent off island to be disposed of. 

I have spent many afternoons in the garden, whether I was digging in the dirt or just enjoying the scenery, and I was not alone. The image above shows Pelicans gathered in the garden during one of the two garden parties of the summer in which we ate food made strictly from plants harvested in the garden and enjoyed the beauty of our garden by the sea.