Food on Ship

The last rating in the Supply Department is the CS rating, which stands for Culinary Specialist. They are the ones in charge of all the food served in what civilians call a cafeteria. On ship it is called a galley or the messdecks. There are at least four galleys on ship, one for general crew or E-6 and below, one called the Chief’s Mess for people ranking E-7 to E-9, another called the Wardroom where all the officers eat, and the last one is for the Commanding Officer on the ship and those he or she chooses to eat with them that meal. Each galley has a scullery with them, where the dishes are washed, which varies depending on the size of the messdeck attached to it. The sculleries for the Wardroom and Chief’s Mess are at most half the size of the one attached to the general crew messdeck. Many ships also have a separate messdeck for people ranking E-6 but most smaller ships merely have an area separated from the rest of the crew in the general crew messdeck for the first class petty officers, or E-6 personnel. Some of the larger ships have a few messdecks for the crew, each one specialized so one may be serving fast food items like burgers and fries while the other is serving a regular meal like lasagna and peas. Each messdeck also has a salad bar, a drink bar for sodas or coffee, and a desert area for cookies or pies or whatever the bakeroom made for the day. One last thing to think about concerning the messdecks is that meals are only served during specific hours. Although the Chief’s Mess and Wardroom make sure to always have a few plates of snacks available all day long, the crew messdeck is only open for meal times, although there may be fruit or some left over deserts left on the messdeck between meals for hungry crew members. While in port they serve three meals a day but underway the ship serves a fourth meal about midnight, called midrats, for those that work the late shift and sleep during the day.
A long with knowing where the galleys and messdecks on ship are, you also need to understand where and how the food is stored. There are two basic areas: the reefer decks and dry storage. Together the rooms take up a large part of the lowest deck of the ship and it is a huge pain to carry the food needed each day from those rooms to the galley that needs it. The dry storage is where the cans of things like syrup, ketchup, noodles, canned fruits, oatmeal, and any other thing you may put in a pantry or cupboard would go while all the stuff you would put in the refrigerator or freezer would go in the appropriate rooms in the reefer deck. True, if you have a replicator you probably have no need for food storage, but if you have food that doesn’t do good replicated or want to save energy to replicate other things like repair parts than you will need to think about food storage. You may even want a garden on ship to grow certain things, but that will be discussed in another post.