Why the Navy Spends Millions on Submarine Menus

Kind: captions Language: en The best food in the Navy isn't served as a reward. It's damage control. On a submarine, a kitchen fire can be more dangerous than an enemy torpedo. It can consume oxygen and fill the boat with toxic smoke that can't simply be vented away. That's why they serve lobster, not as a perk, as a morale weapon. So, what happens when morale collapses hundreds of feet underwater? The most dangerous part of a fire on a submarine galley isn't just the flames, it's the fuel. Grease fires have a nasty habit of turning into a bomb when water touches them. Burning oil is blasted across every surface. Plenty of people have learned this lesson the hard way. Now, imagine that same fire inside a sealed steel tube packed with 150 people. On land, a kitchen fire is a bad day. On a surface ship, it's an emergency. On a submarine, it is certain death. The fire, the toxic fumes, and the crew are all trapped in the same airtight box. And the tools used to smother the fire, CO2, foam, dry chemicals, create problems of their own. With these smothering agents, the fire eventually goes out, but what about the smoke? It's thick, it's oily, and a submarine's cutting-edge air systems can only scrub so much of it so fast. The actual fastest way to clear toxic smoke from a submarine is to surface and crack the hatches open, which is a problem. The entire point of a ballistic missile submarine is that nobody is supposed to know where it is. Not submarines, not satellites, sonar, the enemy, or anyone. Surfacing to vent smoke means popping up in the middle of the ocean and broadcasting your exact coordinates to whoever happens to be listening. All for the worst possible reason, somebody burned the french fries. This is the safety battle the US Navy's been waging for decades on every single one of its submarines. It gets even stranger. The air inside a modern US submarine isn't normal air. We breathe roughly 21% oxygen. Submariners breathe closer to 19%, making it thinner and slightly more sluggish. And that is by design. Less oxygen means a fire has a harder time taking hold. The Navy engineered the atmosphere itself to make combustion more difficult. And smack-dab in the center of that carefully deoxygenated sealed environment, they put a vat of hot oil. What most people don't realize is that a submarine's menu isn't designed around nutrition. It's designed around a disaster. Every appliance, every recipe, every cooking procedure exists because one mistake in the galley can threaten the entire boat. So, why not just play it safe? Strip it all back, serve prepackaged rations with no heat, no oil, or no risk. Well, the Navy also learned that the danger of feeding people badly is just as real as the danger of a fire. It's just slower and a lot harder to see coming until it's too late. Ask around and you might hear the same claim over and over that submarines have the best food in the entire US military. Depending on who you ask, you might be regaled with tales of steak and lobster nights. Another submariner might give you an eye roll it cafeteria food, just slightly better than what you're imagining. Both of those things can be true. What's not in dispute is the baseline. Submarines are the only naval vessels with deep fat fryers. Much of what comes out of a submarine galley, including bread, pizza dough, burger patties, and even whipped cream, is made from scratch, not reconstituted. Compared to the alternative, months of sealed cans and freeze-dried rations, that's an enormous gap, whether or not it clears some imagined five-star bar. The usual explanation is simple. Being sealed underwater with no sunlight, no contact with home for months at a time is a difficult job. Military's run on their stomach, so better food is a reward for one of the hardest jobs the Navy offers. But, there's a problem with that theory. Rewards are nice, but they don't justify taking extra risks with open flames, hot oil, and complex meals inside a $2 billion warship. So, if the reward is only half the story, what is the other half? Let's start with the sailors themselves. Before a submariner even sets foot on a boat, the Navy has already spent upwards of 2 years training them. Add up the pressurized escape training tests, mental health screenings, lectures, and simulators, and the Navy is several hundred thousand dollars deep on a single sailor, and they haven't even started the job yet. That investment is all front-loaded. A lot of it happens before the Navy gets a single day of payoff. A sailor who washes out, burns out, or simply decides 3 months in a tube isn't worth it to them, well, that's all that time and money gone. Now, scale that up, an Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine carries a crew of more than 150 sailors, officers, reactor operators, machinists, sonar technicians, and other specialists that the Navy spent years training. Together, they're worth tens of millions of dollars in training and experience. They are sealed underwater for months at a time with little to break up the routine except the next watch, the next meal, and the next watch after that. On a ballistic missile submarine, morale isn't about keeping people happy, it's about keeping them. Because every sailor who decides not to re-enlist takes a six-figure investment in years of experience out the hatch with them. So, yes, steak night is a reward, but it's also the cheapest insurance policy the Navy can buy. The morale return on good food is worth more than the cost and the danger of the equipment required to make it. But, they still have to make it, so how do they go about it? Picture a kitchen roughly the size of a large walk-in closet, about 10 ft by 14 ft. It's got two convection ovens side-by-side, a microwave, a deep fryer, a flat-top electric griddle, two oversized soup pots, an industrial mixer, and that is basically the entire equipment list. Unless you're Italian and you can justify installing a very large espresso machine on your nuclear sub. Now, picture that kitchen running four meals a day, every day, for 90 days straight with a two-person cooking staff per shift. On a nuclear-powered submarine, there is no such thing as closing time. The boat runs round the clock. That means the crew eats around the clock at breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a fourth meal in the middle of the night called midrats or midnight rations for whoever's coming off watch. Every piece of equipment crammed into that closet-sized space is electric or steam-powered. There's no flame in sight. That single design choice resolves two completely different problems at once. The first is an obvious one. Take away the open flame and that routine accident where a cook left a pan on just a little too long or a spill near the burner has one less avenue to escalate into something catastrophic. The second problem is the one that you're probably not thinking about. Burning gas, propane, or whatever produces carbon dioxide as a byproduct. On land, that's irrelevant. The CO2 just disperses into the atmosphere that is essentially infinite. On a submerged submarine, it's a different story. The crew is already exhaling CO2 constantly. In a sealed submarine, dedicated equipment has to work constantly to remove it before it reaches dangerous levels. Adding a gas-powered kitchen would mean deliberately creating even more of the very gas the boat is trying to get rid of. Electric stoves solve that problem for free. There's another strange irony sitting underneath all of this. The submarine's galley exists aboard a vessel powered by a nuclear reactor. That is the same type of reactor that the Navy has considered using as an emergency power source for entire towns after hurricanes knocked out their electrical grids. A reactor like that produces more than enough power for convection ovens, mixers, and everything else in the galley, so gas cooking isn't solving a problem, it's just creating one. You would be adding a fuel source the submarine doesn't need just to avoid using electricity that it already has in abundance. So, they removed the flames and installed electric appliances. Problem solved, except for one. The deep fryer survived this entire redesign. It's still electric, but it is the one piece of equipment every other ship in the Navy was told to leave behind. Hot oil at sea doesn't need a flame to become dangerous. It just needs to get too hot for too long with nobody watching. And yet, the fryer stayed because the food it makes is valuable enough to enough people that the navy decided the risk was worth it. That fryer isn't the only thing in the galley creating a problem nobody can fully solve. Even with zero flames, cooking for 150 people four times a day for two months produces another byproduct that has nowhere else to go. The smell. A submarine doesn't have air conditioning in the way your house does. It has air management systems. That's because the air inside the hull of the submarine is being reused, not simply refreshed. The same finite volume of air has to be recirculated through the same ductwork and breathed by the same people the entire time the vessel is underway. And nothing escapes that air, including the smell. The submarine's atmosphere control systems do catch some of what's floating around. Particulates get pulled out with washable filters and fumes get processed by the same burners and scrubbers that manage everything else. But while you can filter a particle, you can't always filter a smell, especially when there is no outside to push it to. So, it just stays and it gets layered into everything permanently. Ask submariners what their boat smells like and the list might run long depending on the time and the context in which you're asking. There's the ammonia-like bite of the chemical used in the boat's carbon dioxide scrubbers, diesel and hydraulic oil giving parts of the boat an almost automotive smell, the galley, especially the deep fryer, smells of hot oil and the occasional burnt batch of bread. Elsewhere, it's ozone in hot electronics, a faint hint of the boat's waste system, and of course, the crew members who don't shower anywhere near as often as they're supposed to. These smells seep into everything and they don't wash out easily. Even on leave, submariners have called it the sub stink, sub stank, or even boaty odor. Sub stank is difficult to pinpoint because it is technically all the smells at once. Farts, body odor, bad breath, ozone, amine, cooking, baking, garbage, and the slow accumulated funk of over a hundred people living in a sealed metal tube. One technician who worked aboard about 20 submarines, American and British, said every single one had it. It varied a little boat to boat, but it was never not there. These smells permeate your hair, your clothes, and your skin. It doesn't wash out easily. Some describe it as lingering for weeks after a patrol ends. One of the most interesting stories about sub stink is about the one time it disappeared and what it brought back. The crew went through a full shipyard overhaul. The boat got shut down, cut open, gutted, cleaned, repainted, refueled, and bolted back together. Incredibly, it had that brand new submarine smell once again. During sea trials afterward, they brought every system back online one by one. The reactor, hydraulics, electronics, all of it. And there was no sub stink. The smell was gone. The ship had been cured against all odds. And then, they fired up the galley and three days of cooking later, the sub stink was back at full strength like it never left. No single ingredient or smell brought the sub stink back on its own. It was the cooking plus the oil, the bodies, the farts, and the ozone that were one happy symbiotic family. Cooking was just the final ingredient, the one that completed the recipe. That tells us something. On a submarine, smell is a status report. If the galley can be smelled, it means it's doing its job. Another system in a tightly controlled ecosystem keeping everyone alive underwater. But the moment the galley comes online, something else begins. A race against time. Before this boat even leaves port, 22,000 eggs, 800 lb of butter, 500 lb of coffee, 18,000 lb of frozen meat, and 20,000 lb of canned goods are loaded aboard. The crew will burn through that at a rate of roughly 200 lb of meat per day for 3 months straight. All of that food has to get stored somewhere, and on a submarine, somewhere means everywhere. The hallways will fill up with cases of food stacked knee-high with plywood laid over top so the people can actually walk. For the first few weeks of patrol, the submarine's hallways double as a pantry. You are quite literally walking on dinner. The pantry comes with its own countdown clock. For the first couple weeks, the good times roll as the sub gets underway. There's fresh produce in abundance and real milk. It's as close to a normal kitchen as the sub is ever going to get. Everyone should enjoy it while it lasts because it won't. From week three onwards, the fresh milk is gone, replaced by a shelf-stable substitute dispensed from something submariners have nicknamed the plastic cow. Fresh meat and produce give way to frozen. The phase runs for several weeks. It's not glamorous, but it is survivable. Then around week nine, the powdered era begins. Powdered eggs and milk in abundance. Everything from cans. Everything gets reconstituted. At this point, hot sauce becomes a tool, not a condiment. It's possibly the only thing standing between a sailor and the plate of food that tastes like absolutely nothing. This is where one piece of equipment in that closet-sized galley becomes, against all logic, one of the most important of machines on the entire boat, the soft-serve ice cream machine. Submariners call it the auto dog. That's because the soft-serve comes out of the dispenser in long coiled ropes. And sailors decided that it looks like, well, a dog doing its business. Navy humor, don't overthink it. The point is once the fresh food disappears, that ice cream machine becomes infrastructure. The Navy actually runs a research lab dedicated partly to keeping these machines running. Engineers in Massachusetts spend time developing better cleaning systems and flavor attachments for a shipboard ice cream machine. And that's because, in their own words, it's all about crew morale once you get on board that ship. Somewhere a defense research budget includes a line item for soft-serve. That tells you everything about how seriously the Navy takes this. By week nine, fresh food is a memory. The loudest flavor on anyone's plate is Tabasco. The ice cream machine is protected with the same urgency as the equipment scrubbing the air that everyone is breathing. The nuclear reactor powering this boat could in theory run for 20 years without refueling, sometimes longer. The submarine itself could stay submerged almost indefinitely as far as engineering is concerned, but none of that matters because the actual hard limit on this $2 billion stealth weapon is the food. It's how long people can survive the powdered air before someone has to make a decision. Modern submarine warfare all comes down to groceries, in other words. And that's where the psychological software patch comes in. Researchers who study people in extreme isolation have noticed something strange about people who man submarines, Antarctic research stations, and lunar missions. It doesn't matter how long the mission is, two months or two years, there is a specific point where people start to crack, and it's always in roughly the same place, the third quarter. One researcher said that the third quarter phenomenon is the point where the end is finally in sight. It's exactly when homesickness, depression, irritability, and breakdown in group cohesion all spike at once. A 2021 study followed 29 submariners through an actual deterrent patrol, tracking mood and mental sharpness the whole way. Across the board, their overall mental and emotional state got measurably worse as the patrol went on. Now, put that on top of everything else we talked about, the deterioration of food quality, the lack of sunlight and fresh air, and the tanking mood, all sinking at roughly the same time. The Navy has known about this since submarines became a thing. Submariners have been pointing at this exact moment in a patrol for decades, and they gave it a name long before anyone wrote it up in a journal. They call it halfway night. It's the celebration at the midpoint of the patrol, timed to land right as the crew is heading into that dangerous third quarter window. The Navy doesn't do this halfway. The best meal of the entire patrol gets served, which is probably something like lobster tail, prime rib, or steak. There are games, there's a halfway box, a care package every sailor packs or has their family pack before the submarine even leaves port. It is specifically for this night. Officers and enlisted swap roles for the evening. People get pies thrown in their faces. It is by every account the one night of the patrol that everyone actually looks forward to. It's a party. But looking at the timing, looking at what it's made up of, it also looks a lot like a deliberate dosage at the exact right moment that research says a crew's mood is about to bottom out. The Navy spent decades and untold billions solving the easy problems. There can be no flames in the galley, filtered air to mitigate the smells, a reactor that outlasts the people who built it. What's left, the one problem nobody has fully solved, is biological. Human beings need food, and food is finite. So they did the only thing they could do. They turned the kitchen into the most carefully engineered room on the boat. They scheduled a lobster dinner for the exact night the data shows everyone is about to crack. And they kept the ice cream machine running no matter what. In the end, the most sophisticated machine the Navy ever built has the same off switch as the rest of us. Skip a few meals and even it stops working. Low morale is not the only thing that submariners have to deal with. The threat of death is always lurking in the depths. Watch Worst Submarine Disasters of All Time to see how bad things really get, or click on this video.