Ask a group of seafarers what makes a good ship and almost nobody says the pay first. They say the food. It sounds trivial until you have done a four-month contract where it was bad.
Why it carries so much weight
Take away shore leave, weekends, family, privacy and the ability to go anywhere at all, and what remains of the day is work, sleep and three meals. Two of those you cannot influence. The meals are the only variable, which is why they carry a weight completely out of proportion to their cost.
A cook who takes the job seriously changes the atmosphere of a whole ship. A cook who does not means twenty-two people spend four months mildly, continuously disappointed three times a day.
The provisioning problem
Stores are ordered by the Master and Cook together, usually against a daily victualling rate — a fixed budget per person per day. The order goes to the agent in a port where provisions are cheap and reliable, not necessarily the next port.
Then you have to store it. Fresh vegetables last perhaps two weeks. Fruit less. Frozen stores are planned for the whole passage plus a safety margin, because a delay of ten days is entirely normal and running short is not an option. Week one you eat salad. Week five you eat cabbage. Week eight you are grateful for cabbage.
A mixed crew, one galley
Most merchant ships are multinational. On my last vessel the officers were European and Indian and the ratings Filipino, and the galley produced two menus at every meal for four months. Not out of policy — the cook simply decided that was the job.
Religious and dietary requirements sit on top of that: halal meat, vegetarian meals, and on some ships no pork on board at all. None of it is complicated in a shore kitchen. In a galley the size of a small bathroom, in a seaway, for twenty-two people, it is genuine skill.
Cooking in a seaway
In heavy weather the galley becomes genuinely hazardous. Stoves have fiddles — steel bars to stop pots sliding — and pots have clamps, and none of it fully works when the ship rolls twenty degrees. Deep-fat frying stops entirely.
Bad weather food is sandwiches, soup and whatever can be produced without an open pan. The crew do not complain about this. They complain if it goes on for four days.
FROM THE MESS ROOMSunday barbecue on the poop deck, weather permitting, is not a perk. On a ship where nobody has been ashore in six weeks it is the only thing on the calendar that is not work.
What the rules require
This is not left entirely to goodwill. Under the Maritime Labour Convention, food and drinking water must be provided free of charge, in appropriate quantity and quality, with regard to the number of crew and their religious and cultural backgrounds. Catering staff must be trained, and the ship’s cook on most vessels must be certificated.
Inspections check it. Port State Control officers look at the galley, the cold rooms and the provision records, and food complaints are one of the more common findings raised during MLC inspections.