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.
13 Comments
Tim · August 24, 2026 at 9:24 am
As the saying goes “choose your rate, choose your fate”. I was on the USS America in the early 80’s. I missed out on a lot of what you went through as a 3rd class Data Systems Tech. I pulled my share of work parties and watches. We were one the first ships to be given a real beer on deployment when we were in the I/O.
Tom em2(ss) · August 24, 2026 at 1:02 pm
On subs for 7 years, few great cooks, few terrible. Loaded usda grade d meat that was rejected by usaf. Ate fried veal patty for 3 weeks ,not cooks fault ,more schedule problem. Worst food was basic . Fresh milk was gone 4 to 5 days after we left port. One bad cook brought in cakes from publix while we were in port ,and he burn thanksgiving dinner.
Karl Schmidt · August 24, 2026 at 10:02 am
Thanks for that article. I had no idea about 95% of what goes on, on a military ship. I really enjoyed.
dave in pa. · August 24, 2026 at 12:54 pm
my neighbor was in the navy. on subs. we where talking about food a while back and I was telling him about egg soup. yeah, I was a grunt in the army. he told me about the “snack list” they all filled out before going out (????) after hearing that and other food stuffs he got while at sea
made me realize that I had joined the wrong branch. I told him of cold C-rats and the really bad MREs when they first came out. the few times we got “LURP rats” where good if you liked rice.
found out later that those where made by Mountain house.
and a few times when we did get “hot A meals” and then it started to rain. yeah, egg soup.
BTW, green eggs and ham was a real thing. scrambled eggs in a mermite cans turn green.
depending on how long the trip took from kitchen to you is how green they might be.
and he tells me of a snack list. you know, peanuts, chips or whatever that they would get while at sea ? if you got fed steak and eggs, well, they where sending you into the shit.
might as well fill up because you didn’t know when your next meal would be.
BTW. we used to “strip down” our C-rats before going out. you only took what you wanted or needed. doesn’t sound like much, but when you walking for days it damn sure does.
1/503 PIR a very long time ago now.
Stefan v. · August 24, 2026 at 1:27 pm
Old skool infantry in Old Oz, out bush we were scheduled 4 litres per man per day. You fight at most at 80% of training, so sometimes it was 2 litres per man per day. Shaving and foot, ballsac/armpit hygiene requirements were not relaxed. You got by. You learned. Save water, find water. Be a heat casualty, or in wartime just die already. Sadly, our enemy was behind and within. Now…pussies and poofters, spewing the party line.
Meanoldfart · August 24, 2026 at 3:14 pm
I found Navy chow quite good, whether onboard ship or deployed to Naval Bases. Subic Bay, Diego Garcia & Coronado in particular had excellent chow halls. The LST’s, LPH’s & LSD’s I embarked on had good food (even The DePuke), too. No crayons though…….
Tennessee Budd · August 24, 2026 at 7:08 pm
In ’89, I went TAD to the Chiefs’ Mess on CV 67. Ate like a king for 3 months.
Christmas ’88, we were across the pier from (IIRC) USS Wisconsin (one of the BBs, anyway). Her mess was being rehabbed, so we gave them the use of our forward mess deck. Before long, they had to check IDs in the mess line–all of us wanted to eat forward. Battleship cooks are good!
Both my carriers served pretty good chow, but the base galleys were better! I have to say, though, that food in the ‘yards wasn’t great.
pcb_duffer · August 24, 2026 at 7:09 pm
A man who was a good friend to my dad and to me was a retired USN Mustang (an enlisted man who got commissioned as an officer and spent at least 10 years as such). He used to tell the story about the Navy getting a really good price on chickens from Lebanon in the early 70s. The whole fleet had chicken four meals a day from the eastern Med to Norfolk. After that, he never had a taste for chicken!
Unknownsailor · August 24, 2026 at 10:31 pm
I only saw push-button shower heads on the Kitty Hawk in the 1990s. On the 3 Nimitz class I was on, there were low flow shower heads in the showers, not push button. Water hours were rare, IME, but they were threatened a lot. CHENG was always worried about fresh water. Hit water was always the issue, sometimes there wasn’t any, so cold water shower was what you did.
Forward mess deck is ran by the Culinary Specialists that are from the squadrons, who run the squadron barracks back at the home air station. It is mostly baked or fried food, so a lot of hot dogs, hamburgers, chicken nuggets, fish sticks, stuff like that. It is smaller, but the line to eat usually moves faster.
There are soda machines in a lot of places. Carriers don’t use cash for the store or soda machines, there is a debit card system called Navy Cash that is used now. You can use an ATM machine that is linked to your bank account, and if you want you can have an allotment for direct deposit that goes to Navy Cash.
The heaters on the carriers all work on low pressure steam, and don’t usually work so hot, so in the winter it is always cold.
The problem carriers have feeding the crew is that the enlisted galley cooks are always the worst cooks on the ship, and like the rest of the crew they are split into a day shift and a night shift, so each shift cooks 2 meals split lunch/dinner for days, and mids/breakfast for nights, so each shift is trying to cook for about 1500 people at a time, which doesn’t leave a lot of time for seasoning, variations, or extras, so the food is plain.
I preferred to eat forward, for several reasons 1) it is hard to undercook what they serve there 2) I never got food poisoning 3) I hate waiting in line, and I rarely liked what was being served in the aft galley.
The only exception is for breakfast; most carriers I was on did eggs to order in the morning at the aft galley, and I liked my ham and onion omelette in the morning.
DB · August 25, 2026 at 6:34 am
I was on the Columbus SSN-762 out of Pearl in the 90’s and squadron would ship down our food to sit in the hot Hawaiian sun for 2 hours while everyone was lined up to hand load the food. This is when I discovered that the meat was USDA NOT approved, even federal prisoners are required to have USDA approved meat. When they went to cook the crab legs it stunk the boat up with a horrible ammonia smell. We stored eggs in the bilge and were eating on those for 6 weeks until they finally ran out.
Don Curton · August 25, 2026 at 8:19 am
I would think OPSEC would dictate a total social media ban. Hard to believe that a ship on deployment could have each and every sailor on board posting to the internet.
Interesting overview of navy food, thanks for posting.
EN2 SS · August 25, 2026 at 12:31 pm
What is there to say? I was in a submarine built in 1952, for three years in 69-72. The batteries always got the water, not the ones like me running the two stills to make it. Two battery packs, 252 cells each weighing over a ton per cell, need lot’s of water. We did learn to use the AC evaporator water in the control room to rinse off occasionally. While in the Med, I went on the carrier for some parts, it was literally possible to hide my boat in some of the passageways. My first hot bunk was so small that if I got in bed on my back, I could not turn over, I had to get out, turn over and crawl back in.
Tom (em2 ss) · August 25, 2026 at 9:42 pm
I had forgot hotracking, only did it for 6 months but had top rack with a pipe running down center of overhead, sorta slept around it. One of guys wife, cut down twin sheets to fit the small matteresses…later on foam pads helped but COB would throw them out if he found them.
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