What do they eat on submarines?

Answer 1

Submariners historically enjoy better food than the rest of the fleet, in part because it's hazardous duty, and also because of the smaller crews. Food is more easily prepared for just over a hundred, as opposed to several hundred or a few thousand on large ships.

Unlike ships, who can resupply regularly, fresh stuff goes pretty fast aboard a submarine once you get underway. Fresh fruit and veggies, along with fresh milk, is usually gone within a couple of weeks. Eggs, when preserved properly, can last up to 6 weeks. It's good since the powdered eggs aren't that great.

For beverages, soda machines, bug juice (essentially Kool-Aid), coffee and tea (a true submariner can carry a tray of 6 cups of coffee up a ladder in State 3 seas without spilling a drop) and water are the choices. Usually there's also Hot Chocolate packages that you can mix with hot water as well, but we used to mix them with fresh coffee. Coffee is available as either instant or brewed, though a lot of us used to add brewed coffee to a half-cup of instant coffee grains for that extra caffeine jolt during those days when you're doing drills and are at Battlestations for 30 or 40 hours with only an hour or so of sleep when you can get it.

We didn't have a soda machine on my boat, but I, like some others, used to bring canned soda with us onboard for long trips. Modern boats have regular soda machines like restaurants/fast food joints.

The soft ice cream machine is arguably one of the most important machines aboard. Powdered milk really sucks, so when fresh milk goes, the ice cream machine is the only good source of calcium that the crew gets. I remember one incident where my first CO wanted to put a restriction on the ice cream machine, but was overruled by the Doc, citing crew health needs.

In addition to frozen food (beef, pork, fish, shellfish, etc.) there are refrigerated foods (butter, cheese, ham, salami, etc.), and a lot of canned stuff (veggies, tamales, beans, you name it). Just about anything you could get at a decent restaurant or make at home is made aboard a submarine.

There are times when cooks need to be creative though. During our trip to the North Pole in '86 (some pics on my Supervisor Bio) we lost our refrigerant capacity after about 2 weeks deployed, and returning to base wasn't an option. We dumped a lot of bad food on the ice, and though we packed the freezers with chopped blocks of ice and we got fresh stores from one of the ice camps, it didn't last long. They gave us 5 gallon containers of ice cream; we knew it wouldn't keep, so we had a crew-wide ice cream eating party before it all melted. The absolute best was when one of the ice camp helos brought us our mail and some fresh oranges and veggies. The thing you crave the most after about a month is fresh veggies and fruit; those oranges were fantastic.

We put a lot of the canned refrigerated stuff in one of the torpedo tubes, since the water in the Arctic is a constant 28 degrees. The cooks got pretty creative with the canned stuff as well (amazing what they did with canned tamales) though to this day I don't eat ham and cheese Sandwiches since it was the only thing that didn't spoil we had a lot of. The worst part was that our mission required us to stay under the ice, and the ice in the freezers had melted, leaving about a ton of rotting food inside. We couldn't dump it through the trash chute until we could come to Periscope Depth and run a ventilation chute directly to the freezer. I still remember when they cracked open the freezer - even with the blower running and pulling the air directly from the freezer area, the smell of rotting meat went through the boat in an instant. It took 2 months for me to start eating steak again, and I lost about 70lbs on that trip. Others lost a lot of weight as well, but I should point out that those of us who lost a lot were trying to lose it. Having food problems just made it easier.

Occasionally a specific port visit will bring surprises; when we went to Groton (Submarine Base) for pre-deployment training one year, the CO bought the crew several cases of Maine lobster tails. Along with some steaks from the freezer, they were mighty tasty....