Navy Food

There is a lot of press on the Navy and the conditions on its ships. Let’s talk about a few of them:

Water

• An aircraft carrier makes about 400,000 gallons of water per day through distillation. The total amount of water used is not just for personnel use. Water use is prolific.

• Galleys: Preparing roughly 18,000 meals daily, beverages, washing produce, cleaning equipment, and operating dishwashers.
• Laundry: Several thousand people generate an enormous daily laundry load. This includes the main ship’s laundry, uniform washing, linens, towels, and medical laundry.
• Aircraft maintenance: Fresh-water washing removes salt from aircraft and engines to prevent corrosion. The Navy considers this mission-essential even during water restrictions.
• Steam catapults: Roughly 200 gallons’ water-equivalent per launch. One hundred launches would represent about 20,000 gallons.
• Reactor and steam plants: High-purity makeup water replaces losses in the propulsion, electrical-generation, and auxiliary steam systems. Most water circulates repeatedly, but leakage, sampling, maintenance, and steam losses require replacement.
• Medical and dental spaces: Sterilizers, scrub sinks, laboratory work, patient care, and sanitation.
• Ship cleaning and sanitation: Galley decks, berthing, heads, workshops, food-service spaces, and garbage-processing areas.
• Closed-loop machinery systems: Air-conditioning chilled water and other cooling or heating circuits normally recirculate their water, but require makeup water.
• Potable-water-system maintenance: Tank cleaning, flushing repaired piping, testing, leakage, and maintaining tank reserves.

During my six years living on a carrier, we were constantly placed on water restrictions. There were days when we couldn’t shower. We heard a constant round of complaining from the CO that he wanted us to use less than 22 gallons per person, per day.

For that reason, the Navy has special shower heads for enlisted showers that require you to hold down a stiff button to get water. Showers that simply run like the ones in your home are referred to as “Hollywood showers” and are not permitted.

Food

The food on submarines is top notch. While the food on aircraft carriers isn’t as high quality, it’s still plentiful. There were multiple dining facilities. Let me demonstrate:

• There are three dining facilities for officers (called wardrooms) onboard. I never worked or ate in any of them, so I can’t give more details than that.
• The Captain’s mess is for the commanding officer to have private meals with anyone he invites to dine with him.
• There is a similar dining facility called the Admiral’s mess for the embarked Admiral and his invitees.
• There is a chief’s mess for Chief Petty Officers (E-7 through E-9)
• There are three different dining halls for enlisted crew members (E-1 through E-6) called the mess decks: Forward, Aft, and the Bar (which was connected to and adjacent to the Aft mess decks)

The forward mess decks specialized in fast, grab and go items like hamburgers (sliders), hot dogs (rollers), cereal, boiled eggs, sandwiches made of ham, egg, and cheese, and other quick options.

The aft mess decks were for hot meals. There were usually multiple options there- two or more main dishes to choose from, sides, vegetables, bread, and dessert.

The bar was what it sounds like- a buffet option where salads, a taco bar, a baked potato bar were available. Sailors could assemble those items with common toppings.

Here is the schedule for the enlisted dining:

• 0100-0330: The forward mess decks open for “Jet setters,” a meal of boiled eggs, cereal, and egg sandwiches.
• 0400-0800: Breakfast on both the forward and aft mess decks
• 1000-1200 The bar is open
• 1100-1400 Lunch is served on both the forward and aft mess decks. Full lunch aft, sandwiches, burgers, and dogs as well as fries and sometimes pizza forward.
• 1400-1600: The bar is open
• 1600-1900: Forward and Aft mess decks open for dinner
• 2100-0100: Aft mess decks open for “midrats” which is usually composed of leftovers from dinner, as well as cold cuts to make sandwiches.

There were choices, and as you can see, there was somewhere and something to eat 19.5 hours per day. In addition, there were multiple stores for sailors to purchase snacks, chips, candy bars, etc.. The Navy calls that stuff “geedunk” and it is sold onboard. The third deck has the ship’s “mall” where things like soap, uniform items, stationery, geedunk, and other things can be bought. It’s on the 3rd deck, next to the post office. Six floors higher, on the 03 level, there was the “Seven-11” where geedunk was for sale. It was located next to the ship’s barber shop, which offered free haircuts. On the second deck, next to the video arcade between the personnel offices and the aft mess decks, there were half a dozen soda and snack machines.

You could always eat. Now I will say that I didn’t always like the food, but there was always plenty of it. Our mess cooks had a high number of Philipinos, and that caused us to eat a lot of adobo and other foods from that nation. I didn’t like that. I tried not to eat on the forward mess decks because I didn’t want to eat a lot of junk, but sometimes I did because the lines to eat aft were long, especially when the food being served aft was good.

On the nights when there was steak, pizza, spaghetti, lobster, or other popular meals, a person could wait in line for an hour or more to eat. My duties didn’t permit me that kind of time, so I would eat a slider from forward. We would get steak and/or lobster about once per month when deployed.

The food was repetitive sometimes, because the mess cooks would screw up and order too much of something. They would get creative in naming it, in an attempt to make us forget we were eating the same meal every day for a week. First it was steamship round, then Yankee pot roast, Savory Roast beef, Prime rib, beef stew, pepper steak, etc,. We once ate chicken at every meal for 14 days straight. Even for breakfast.

Once we were at sea for 45 days or longer, each Friday we would have pizza and pasta night. During that meal, each sailor who wanted it could have two non-alcoholic beers. The enlisted got O’Douls, the chiefs and officers got Sharp’s.

I was once assigned to a working party that was onloading food at the pier in Norfolk. It sucked, because we were carrying food onboard while it was snowing. Four of us ducked into an electrical load center with a box of donuts and hid in there, snacking. The issue is that we had to get rid of the evidence or we would have been caught. So we ate the entire box. There are 144 donuts in a box. The donuts were lemon filled. Eating 3 dozen donuts made me sick. I couldn’t stand the taste of lemon filling for years after that.

Did we bitch about it? Of course we did. Our command Master Chief (the senior enlisted man onboard) used to say “A bitching sailor is a happy sailor. When they stop complaining and the crew goes silent, that’s when trouble is brewing.” The difference is that today, the sailors have social media and combined with the press looking for any reason to slam the military (and by extension, Trump) the complaints are getting traction in the press.

What should the CO do? Cut off all access to social media for the entire crew. Then have the crew scrub and paint the entire ship until it sparkles, now that they have so much free time. That way, they can’t post videos of mold in the showers or dirty berthing areas because they will be clean.

When I was an E-3, I spent a lot of time needle gunning, painting, buffing and polishing floors, and scrubbing the gadoogin deck edges. In fact, about a third of your workday is spent cleaning things when you are E-3 and below. That’s the real motivation to be promoted- you aren’t a janitor any longer.