Pea Shoots, Pea Scores

Fairly early in this trip, it became obvious that our chef liked to use pea shoots as a garnish. I say "liked", but it soon began to look more like a compulsion. Pretty much the only meal where you could be guaranteed not to see a pea shoot was breakfast. Lunch and dinner? They were everywhere. Starters, mains, we even had them poked artistically into pots of chocolate or raspberry mousse.

I remarked on it to our fellow diners (the Astronomy group, alone among the guests, were always seated together) on the second or third night, and it rapidly turned into an amusing trope for the whole voyage.

But it wasn't until our "Meet the Officers" session this afternoon, that we learned the ubiquitous presence of pea shoots had been noticed by others. During a round-robin question session at the end of the talk, someone asked the catering manager to estimate how much food and drink was consumed during the trip "and in particular, how many kilograms of pea shoots do we get through." :o)

The answer was sixty. 60kg of pea shoots!

I'd conceived this entry in the blog as soon as the question was asked, but it wasn't until the answer arrived that Nikki came up with this much snappier title.

And then something spooky happened. Knowing my nerdy love of numbers, she said I should work out how many pea shoots that worked out at, per passenger, per day. 

I found an academic study on the average size and weight of a pea shoot (yes, really), and a simple average of the results from the five methods of statistical analysis used (really, really) comes out at around 1g. So that 60kg of pea shoots translates very simply into 60,000 of the little green buggers.

But here's the spooky part. If you divide that 60,000 by the number of passengers on this trip (198), and the number of days we've been on board (15), it comes out to this number.

So many "scores" you might think I've fixed the numbers to match the title. But I haven't. It's just one of those weird coincidences. 

Incidentally, we've also chewed our way through...
4000kg fish/seafood
5000kg meat
6000kg fresh veg

...and consumed 3860 bottles of wine. >burp<