How Aircraft Carriers Prepare 17,000 Meals a Day

You may have heard of meals on wheels, but have you ever wondered about the naval-military equivalent? The United States Navy has officially taken mobile mealtime to the next level. Every day that an American nuclear-powered aircraft carrier spends at sea, it has to provide three square meals for the 5,000 hungry sailors who call the ship home. The resulting process is a mind-boggling marvel of culinary engineering. If you're doing the math, I'll spare you the mental gymnastics. That's over 17,000 meals, seven days a week, 365 days a year. How, you ask, is this even possible? Let's find out. They say the way to someone's heart is through their stomach. This certainly applies to hungry American sailors of the U.S. Navy. Aboard the most common aircraft carrier in the Navy fleet, the 100,000-ton Nimitz-class vessel, an average crew complement of between 5,000 and 6,000 sailors will spend months on deployment working, sleeping, and eating aboard their city at sea. Whether you're busy scrubbing the flight deck, flying an F-A-18F Super Hornet, maintaining the nuclear reactor, or overseeing the arresting gear operation, the elementary needs of this crew are truly staggering. Feeding thousands of people in a relatively cramped space requires a Herculean logistical effort. On any given day, a carrier's crew can consume more than 1,600 pounds of chicken, 160 gallons of milk, 30 cases of cereal, and 350 pounds of lettuce, noted Chief Petty Officer Naomi Goodwin, herself responsible for preparing officers' meals aboard an aircraft carrier. Because carriers can spend months at sea, they often deplete their perishable items like fruits and vegetables before the deployment is complete. To compensate, they stock up with as much perishable food as possible at the beginning of a deployment. Once the fresh food disappears, canned or dried goods can only get you so far. To maintain morale as stocks dwindle, a carrier's supply crew is regularly in contact with wholesale distributors who work to replenish stocks whenever a carrier comes near a port. When U.S. Navy warships have to resupply at sea, they use a process called underway replenishment. Getting the food aboard is probably the hardest part. The alongside connective replenishment method is the most common form of underway replenishment. When a supply vessel pulls up to the carrier, it must match its speed on a parallel trajectory, a daunting task in rough seas and choppy winds. Once in place, the two ships are connected by a hotline, followed by a much heavier duty messenger line, which facilitates the transfer of heavy pallets loaded with food, mail, fuel, and other supplies. Coasting across the open watery chasm separating the two vessels, the carrier's crew pulls in heavy palletized cargo and begins storing boxes of pineapples, tomatoes, apples, onions, potatoes, and more in one of the carrier's fluorescent-lit refrigeration and dry storage units. Replete with hanging ethylene filters that preserve products over longer periods by trapping gases that cause ripening, refrigeration units are traditionally located in a centralized area several decks beneath the galley. Vertically stacking galleys and storage areas was a deliberate design choice, giving cooks easy access to the ingredients they need at mealtime using hydraulic lifts and elevators. Resupply occurs every week or so, adding between 400,000 and 1 million pounds of food to the carrier's stocks. If necessary, supplies can also be delivered vertically via helicopter or light aircraft when the situation arises. The five galleys aboard the Nimitz, commissioned in 1975, differ from their more modern counterpart, the USS Ford Supercarrier, commissioned in 2017. While the ships have the same footprint, one journalist observed, space all over the Ford has been reimagined to make carrier life and work better and more efficient. Rather than five galleys, the Ford has two, one centralized in the aft section of the ship, the other forward to serve the carrier's air wing. Alright, so far so good. No one's going hungry anytime soon. But what about drinking water? You need a lot of it to hydrate thousands of sailors in what is often a hot and humid work environment. Luckily, modern aircraft carriers have world-class desalination facilities on board. These portable water plants work almost like a distillery. Water is superheated to steam, then condensed using cooled pipes. Minerals are added as the water is filtered for drinking and general use. All this is powered using the ship's nuclear reactor, which itself only has to be refueled every 25 years. Pretty amazing stuff. While we're on the topic of facilities, wondering what kind of monster kitchen you'd need to service all these sailors, here's the thing. It's not about size, it's about efficiency. A carrier's cooking facilities have been well-designed to cater to the masses. They have to be. A carrier is designed for efficiency. Below deck, snaking maze-like corridors and tiny rooms take advantage of every inch of available space. Kitchens are cramped, filled to the brim with the latest industrial cooking machinery, huge stoves that make the temperature soar in that confined interior space, automated self-cleaning convection ovens that can cook any kind of meat in a variety of ways, commercial-grade mixing bowls, rows upon rows of warming trays, soup vats, tilt skillets, deep fryers, broilers, commercial toasters, microwaves, food storage containers, drying racks, bussing carts, food processors, prep tables, blenders, and more. All this equipment enables culinary specialists to cook huge batches of food for the sailors aboard. What does it all cost to feed a crew this size? Well, grab your wallet because it'll cost a pretty penny. Senior Chief Francis Patil, a culinary specialist aboard the George H.W. Bush, estimated that the Navy spends somewhere between $45,000 to $65,000 a day on food at sea. That's $1.8 million a month. It's pretty good bang for your buck considering what you get. 16,000 to 18,000 meals a day, from 6am breakfasts through to the aptly named mid-rats or midnight rations. But how do the meals actually get prepared? Teams of chefs, known as culinary specialists, form the dream team aboard the carrier. There are around 93 culinary specialists in all, who follow a strict 15-day menu cycle to simplify the meal selection process. The regimented cooking process has been optimized for mass production. Cooks spend hours bulk prepping huge batches of food, a constant responsibility that can be monotonous at times. To add variety to their own schedules, junior cooks are trained on different tasks to make them more versatile in the galley. It is hard work, sometimes at strange hours. The breakfast shift can wake up as early as 3am, to have enough time to prepare enough pancake batter, sausages, oatmeal, eggs, and bacon to go round. Cooks tend to work 12-16 hour shifts that involve prep work, serving, and cleaning. Punctuality and quality are key. Culinary specialists are held to high standards, the same as those they serve on a daily basis. Special meals punctuate an otherwise routine menu offering. Anything from taco Tuesday to a Mongolian grill and a special birthday meal each calendar month that can include a tablecloth, wine glasses, nice music, and a main course of prime rib or lobster are sure morale boosters. On most naval vessels, officers eat in their own mess, known as a wardroom. Smaller and more refined than the canteen area, an officer's mess boasts padded chairs, tablecloths, and glasses of coke garnished with slices of lemon. In the wardroom, cooks stick to the same menu cycle as their counterparts in the general mess. But smaller amounts of people to feed, in the hundreds rather than the thousands, means they can take time to cook and present the food a bit more luxuriously. The wardroom, of course, still isn't the finest dining establishment aboard ship. That is reserved for the captain's cabin, a modest-sized room with hints of the old-fashioned ocean liner about it, where a personal chef diverges from the standard menu, preparing fresh meals for the captain and their guests from whatever ingredients they can find on the ship. Yes, sailors on deployment tend to eat far better than their land-based counterparts in the field. Nobody eats MREs at sea. Underway replenishment adds freshness to shipboard food, even if it is prepared on an industrial scale. One of the favorite meals at sea is chicken wings. But to serve it, culinary specialists must prepare 1,600 kilograms of chicken each time, a number that reinforces the logistical scale of this insane feeding operation. To bring in that home-cooked taste, bakers make use of massive 60-pound dough mixers to make their own bread, rolls, cookies, and other baked goods. Cooking meals from scratch, sometimes in the view of the serving area, communicates how much the Navy values its service members. Veterans often complain that naval chow served in decades past was subpar and inedible. Today, that's no longer the case. It may not be your mother's cooking, but daily meals are meticulously planned and served to be as calorically dense and nutrient-rich as possible. They have to be to fortify sailors working hard on their feet, day in, day out. A look into a daily shift for a culinary specialist reveals how much effort is required to cook for an entire carrier crew. At mealtime, broad heated grills are prepared and manned by young cooks who have the raw food at hand. If, say, a cook is serving lamb, he arranges lamb chop after lamb chop in neat rows until the entire surface is covered with meat, 150 chops at least. By the time the last one is in place, it's time to return to the beginning and flip the meat over to cook on the other side. If the chefs are cooking roast beef, they will slice roughly 600 pounds of meat per meal. Dinner is perhaps the busiest meal of the day. By evening, the main eating bay becomes crowded. Serving lines quickly materialize as sailors find their way to the commissary for some hot chow. Each grabs a plate, utensils, a cup, and napkins cleaned during downtime by members of the culinary specialist crew and begins indicating what they'd like served. Back in 2011, a journalist for the National News observed this process firsthand. Mashed potato and steak with gravy is proving to be a popular choice, but there's also barbecue chicken, stir-fry, pasta, and chicken with tomato sauce on offer. Three young sailors, Jennifer Penner, Elvin Carmona Rivera, and Sarah Strong, are lingering in the cafeteria area, having just finished their meals. They say that while the food on board is perfectly fine, the special fried rice is a particular favorite. They do crave homemade rather than mass-produced meals. I look forward to eating something that's cooked from scratch, just for me, says Strong. This is okay, but you can tell it's been prepared for hundreds of people. Where the general mess doesn't satisfy a sailor's specific cravings, they can browse a small grocery store, where different amenities like hygiene goods, razors, junk food, drinks are available to keep morale high at all times. Carrier grocery stores can make $10,000 a day, showing just how vital they are to the ship's daily operations. Even if it isn't the freshest or most gourmet offering, the fact that the Navy can provide hot chow thousands of miles from land in any condition is nothing short of a modern marvel. It is true that by the time naval sailors reach land once more, they are eager for fresh-cooked food they might once have taken for granted. Wood-fired pizza, mum's home-cooked lasagna, freshly-squeezed orange juice, and more are the tantalizing rewards of a deployment well done. This doesn't detract from the impressive service on display in the galleys and storerooms of America's aircraft carriers. The science and logistics behind the process of cooking at sea is truly impressive. Spending seven to ten months at a time at sea, cooking crews ensure that good food is prepared and delivered in spades on time every day. Have you ever tried Navy chow aboard an aircraft carrier or experienced anything like the Navy's feeding operation? Let us know in the comments, and don't forget to subscribe for more military analysis from military experts.