How The Navy Cooks Serve 1,500 Sailors

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Home Cookin’

It’s bad enough to cook for a family of five. Imagine cooking for 1,500 hungry sailors!

However, people like Cassandra Escobar don’t need their imagination. While aboard the USS Arlington, Escobar and her fellow cooks work sixteen hours a day to feed the crew of Navy and Marine Corps personnel on board. 

Their day usually starts at four in the morning, just two hours before the sailors walk into the mess halls. 

Of course, this job does tend to get repetitive – but Quentin Dickerson, a Navy Culinary Specialist, finds many ways to spice things up from time to time. Something as simple as playing music can help keep the pace up, but so is willfully decorating the food he serves. 

And even though food choices get old, the crews are presented with a wide variety of condiments to mix and match flavors if they want to.