I was in the navy for 8 years and have received food from navy destroyers, aircraft carriers, submarine aids, and shore duty galleys.
When a ship is in port, it always has plenty of fresh food on board. Just before a ship puts to sea, it is replenished with new food and drink.
If you’re going to be at sea for a while, you’ll start to lose some of the things on board that you take for granted. Fresh milk is usually one of the first things to go. They substitute powdered milk for it, and it’s not even close to real milk.
Don’t get me wrong, the food on the ship is pretty good, and you eat in abundance!
When you’re in port, you have access to the freshest foods the marina has, just like your hometown grocery store.
When you get up in the morning, you go down to the kitchen and get in line to eat. There might be 10 people in line by the time you go to eat, and breakfast is usually served most of the morning, because not everyone can eat at the same time, and then it would be crowded. On smaller ships like destroyers and frigates you would normally have 4 meals a day. Breakfast, lunch, dinner and Mid Rats, a small meal that is prepared around midnight for people who are still hungry and want to eat something.
At the destroyer I was parked on, we also used to have cookouts right on the dovetail. We always had a 55-gallon drum cut in half, and someone from the Supply Department was frying up cheeseburgers, and that was always nice, even in the middle of the Indian Ocean, we’d have a cookout.
For breakfast you can usually order your eggs to order, there will be a cook or 2, who will take requests for how you want your eggs done, they had a no more than 5 egg rule, usually only had 2 for the most part of time, and I’d tell them I want a ham and cheese omelette with 2 eggs, and then after I get my eggs, I move down the food line and get whatever else I want to go with that, bacon, sausage, like a real little buffet.
Usually on Fridays if we were in port we would have steak and lobster tails on Fridays. I didn’t even have a lobster tail until I joined the navy. My dad never liked seafood when I was a kid, so we never had it in our house.
Lunch and dinner also used to be like a buffet, almost all they had, was a line of good food, and you take what you want, and you can always get a new tray and get back in line again, if you’re that hungry. .
The aircraft carrier I was on was actually too big a ship for me, and I was very pleased that I only had to stay on it for 2 weeks. They ate well there too, and it had 2 kitchens, so one was always open, if the other closed for cleaning or whatever.
When you have about 5,000 people on board you better have a place for them to eat all the time, like a casino, if the ship had slots it would be pretty much the same atmosphere of a buffet.
When I was in transit somewhere in the Indian Ocean, I had to go to Saudi Arabia to catch a flight to Italy, and a helicopter took me and 5 other enlisted men to this USNS ship, and we were only supposed to travel on the ship for 2 days, until we got off the ship. They had a first class enlisted enlisted who had his own stateroom, which on a regular navy ship, only officers get.
This was a USNS ship, which meant it had civilian workers, and navy personnel supported them. When we ate in his dining room every day, a waiter would come to our table and take his order. I thought to myself, you’ve got to be kidding, these guys are in plain clothes, and a waiter is taking his order, and I can’t even believe this is real. They give you a choice of 2 selections, sort of like on a plane, and they bring you ice cream for dessert, and I thought that was unreal.
Most of the civilians on that ship weren’t cool like the navy guys, probably because they thought the navy worked for them, which on that ship, they sure did, and I could think of various ways to save the navy a a lot of money. !
Submarines get some of the best food in the fleet. They are under water sometimes for so long, and can you imagine if they didn’t have good food?
They have a drink they call bug juice, which is actually Kool-aid or a fruit punch drink. You better get used to drinking bug juice, if you like to drink something with food, after fresh milk runs out.
This is one of the craziest things I’ve ever witnessed on the ship, and all ships do it! It’s a waste of good food, but I suppose you can see how it protects states from pests and bugs, but does it really?
When you go sailing away, you usually go through Hawaii to shop for new stores, as they call it, which means you’re stocking the ship with fresh food, meat and things like that.
As you travel around the world, and then you come back, before you go through Hawaii, you have to throw away any food that might have some kind of bug from another country on it, so we have a working group, maybe 20 guys, and the job is to make a line from the food coolers, that a ship has several decks, all with elevators to do it all together, and we unload all the food, 50 pound bags of new onions, lots and lots of them, big boxes of lettuce, lots of boxes of that.
We throw almost everything that’s left in the coolers overboard into the ocean, and all the guys just can’t believe we’re throwing all this good food overboard, and we bet a lot of sharks are following the ship, can you imagine? how much food would be thrown overboard by an aircraft carrier. An aircraft carrier has a place at the back of the ship to dump trash into the ocean, but only when you’re 50 miles or more out to sea, so it doesn’t wash up on shore and a lot of stuff gets dumped in the sea. ocean, plus food. You can sit and smoke a cigarette, and just look at all the people who have trash to throw into the ocean, which is pretty weird in a way, but you can’t let it build up on the ship.
I have to say that overall the food in the marina is good maybe even great, I never thought it would be as good and filling as it was and some days after being out of the marina I swear their spaghetti is still The best I’ve had in my life!