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What is the food like on a Navy ship?

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 goes to sea, it is replenished with new food and drink.

If you are going to be at sea for a while, you will 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 it for powdered milk, and it doesn’t even come close to real milk.

Don’t get me wrong, the food on the ship is pretty good, and you eat plenty of it!

When you’re in port, you have access to the freshest food 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 can 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 something to eat.

On the destroyer it 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 cheeseburgers, and that was always nice, even in the middle of the Indian Ocean, we had 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 rule of no more than 5 eggs, I usually only had 2 for the most part of time, and I’d tell them I want a ham and cheese omelet 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 everything they had, was a line of good food, and you take what you want, and you can always get a new tray and go back to the 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 happy 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 slot machines, it would be pretty much the same atmosphere as 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 in the ship for 2 days, until we got off the ship. They had an enlisted first-class enlisted man 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 have got to be kidding me, these guys are in civilian clothes, and a waiter is taking his order, and I can’t even believe this is real. They give you a choice between 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 were, and I could think of any number of ways to save the navy a a lot of money. !

Submarines get some of the best food in the fleet. They are underwater 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’d better get used to drinking insect juice, if you like to drink something with your meal, after the fresh milk runs out.

This is one of the craziest things I’ve ever witnessed on the ship, and every ship does it! It’s a waste of good food, but I guess 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 buy new stores, as they call it, which means you’re stocking the ship with fresh food, meat, and things like that.

As you travel the world, and then come back, before you go through Hawaii, you have to throw out all the food that might have some kind of bug from another country, so we have a task force, maybe 20 guys, and the job is to make a line from the food coolers, which 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 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 an aircraft carrier throw overboard? An aircraft carrier has a place in the back of the ship to dump garbage into the ocean, but only when you’re 50 miles or more out to sea, so it doesn’t wash up on shore and so much 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 garbage to throw into the ocean, which is quite strange in a way, but you can’t let it accumulate on the boat.

I must say overall the food at the marina is good maybe even excellent I never thought it would be as good and plentiful as it was and a few days after being away from the marina I swear their spaghetti is still the best i have ever had in my life!

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