It was great on my boat, but I’ve worked on subs ever since getting out and have been on rides on literally dozens of boats and… well, it varies. The determining factor is really how much do the cooks care?
Really, it’s the same institutional food you’d find prepared in any cafeteria. Difference on the boat is that they’re cooking for 130ish people they know and like (hopefully) so a lot of cooks can do wonderful things with what they’ve given.
On the other side of the coin, I’ve been at real garbage commands with nonexistent morale and the food on those boats is generally poor to “meh.”
I never did crank. My first boat was newcon, and when they started up the galley they of course started with the E3s as cranks. By the time the first E4 started cranking, I was an E5, and I was qualified well before the first E5 went cranking.
We coners had a good laugh when the first non-qual nukes went to the mess decks.
As an officer on a 688, I was required to eat in the wardroom. Even junior officers were absolutely prohibited from eating in the crew’s mess. Which we definitely would have preferred because meals in the wardroom were a slog.
This was because lunch and dinner were always formal affairs with separate courses. Soup, salad, main course, dessert. And you couldn’t arrive late or leave early. If you were late, you didn’t eat. And if you didn’t want a course, you just had to sit there. At least breakfast and midrats (midnight rations) weren’t formal. You just told the mess attendant what you wanted (out of what was available).
From my experience, this is true. And the food on boomers (ballistic missile submarines) is even better than the food on fast attack submarines.
Which leads to a funny(?) sea story: I was on on a 688 (fast attack sub) that was sent to an urgent drydocking for repairs at the sub base in King’s Bay, Georgia—which is a ballistic missile submarine base, Anyway, after a few weeks there we needed to buy some food to replenish our stores, only to be told by the base supply officer that the food was “for missile boats only.” So our supply officer made friends with the supply officer of a missile boat, and bought $75K of food from their boat. Then we had a transfer party move stores from one sub to another. And the missile boat then immediately put in an order to replenish their stores. (Yet another one of those workarounds to overcome the petty tyrants of Navy bureaucracy.) I remember that the food we got from that transfer was much better than our normal food. For example, they had name-brand items, like Jif peanut butter, instead of weird off-brands nobody had ever heard of like “Little Jasper’s” peanut butter.
But the best food we ever got was on a deployment when we resupplied in Tromsø, Norway. We got some kind of mix there for our soft-ice cream machine that actually tasted good. We were allowed to resupply at a foreign base because we were getting really low on stores. Meals were getting pretty weird by the end: like chili mac and canned beets.
Another factor was feedback from the crew. I did a deployment once where the crew kept complaining the food was “too spicy.” So the cooks kept cutting back all of the spices to basically nothing until the food was completely flavorless. In the wardroom we were going through cases of hot sauce just to put some flavor back into the food.
The only time I’ve ever eaten military chow in my life was when I was 15 in 1998 and I got picked from my Navy JROTC high school class to do a week-long “mini boot camp” at Camp Pendleton, and we ate in the same chow hall that the Marines did. It was indeed served cafeteria-style and you got your choice of an entree and sides. I don’t remember much of what I ate except that the chili mac was decent and our student officers kept warning us not to fill up our canteens with soda from the fountain dispenser.
The packaged sliced gyro meat that I suggested above, which sounds like it’s a civilian equivalent of the “meat loaf” mentioned above, is already slightly gray in the package. I assume it’s because it’s been ground, processed, baked, sliced, and vacuum-sealed for extended shelf life before being sold.
True. The news was the other day, the first day the record was set, but Ford is still deployed. It looks like H W Bush is relieving her? I did not know she’d stopped in Crete.
I’ve cooked and sliced roast beef that looked like that. It was processed, flavoured, and vacuum sealed for extended shelf life before I bought, cooked and sliced it. The texture was very good, so I suspect that the flavouring process also softened it somehow.
Being Air Force EOD, serving as XO of a US Navy Staff (and part of the ‘Wardroom’), in a Marine Corps battlespace (2 MARDIV) in Afghanistan overseeing an Army Platoon & Air Force Flight;
I visited the Nebraska in port, for a ‘walk-through’ tour, a couple of years ago, and walked through the actual Wardroom where the junior officers were doing their paperwork between patrols. There was an obvious air of formality, even while at berth.
Now, I get the tradition of the Officers’ Mess, but the Navy seems to take it to the “nth degree.” But what do I know? I’ll take it to another thread . . .
Tripler
My usual messing: “Hey Mike, huck me an MRE, woudja?”
During the halfway night festivities on deployment all ten seats in the wardroom would be auctioned off (real money, donated to the boat’s rec fund) for the evening meal. The highest bidder got the CO’s armchair, at the head of the table, and a cook waited on them, as was normal for that table. The CO and XO, and all the other officers, ate that meal in the crew’s mess.
