Eating Aboard Ship: Then and Now

 According to Eats History, Captain James Cook carried out the longest and largest nutritional research project of his time when he loaded the HMS Endeavour with "5,500 litres of beer, 7,300 litres of spirits, 16 tonnes of bread, 2 tonnes of salted beef and more than 3 tonnes of sauerkraut." He planned to feed his sailors  approximately 5,000 calories a day to sustain the physical demands of running an 18th century sailing ship. "A typical daily menu aboard the Endeavour consisted of breakfast with boiled wheat and sugar, a midday dinner of salted beef stew and vegetables, and an evening meal of soup with ship's biscuits."

 Thanks to the sauerkraut, not a single sailor was lost to scurvy on the trip. But initially, the sailors refused to eat the unfamiliar vegetable. So, Cook made sure they saw the officers eating it, and then the sailors adopted it too. 

 Contrast that with what the sailors on the USS Abraham Lincoln warship eat today as they are deployed in the Iranian so-called "war":  a single meat patty, a slab of dried meat and some boiled carrots. More than 50,000 troops are deployed in the Iranian gulf and some are sending photos of their meals home in desperation. 

 

Fake news! the Navy and Secy. Pete Hegseth has cried. When faced with a photo of a food worker cooking in the ship's kitchen with trays of skimpy food in the foreground, a detractor said the photos were obviously taken elsewhere because "ship kitchens are not  made of cinder blocks." (The kitchen is tiled.) 

Meanwhile supporters gush over photos of Donald Trump on board the ship, sharing a meal in the mess hall with lavishly filled fast food dinners. According to Snopes and other fact-checking sites, Trump has never visited the ship.