How Meals Win Wars
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Common meals, especially when you work in a high pressure environmenss, do create something special - something even above "team spirit", a kind of zen moment that provides a unity of purpose.
I remember when 10 years ago I worked as a medical resident in the ICU, and the SAMU (french helimed, basically, if you are really badly damaged, we fly a physician, a paramed and a nurse in a chopper, to right where you are).
It was physically quite demanding: when the times are slow, residents for example had to check the expiration dates, reload doses of the drugs that had been put to use in the kits, test the batteries of the various devices, etc. Boring.
But when you hear a beep, or when your team name is called, you go. You run to the chopper, or to the ICU if they are low on personel and have to give you other assignements.
Anytime in between the beep/run/equipment maintainance, you try to sleep and eat - anyway you can. Back when I did it, it was either in 8h cycles (in one sane departement) or in 24h cycles (everywhere else- a law was voted, but didn't help a lot. too bad)
Anyway, one of the "advantages" of working in 8h rotations or doing a straight 24h was that we also had access to food, 24/7 - made daily by a cook around 11am-1pm and conditioned in small portions, but also industrial food of various kind (things you stuff your pocket with if you worry about fainting when your blood glucose sinks too low, but that you'll do your best NOT TO EAT.)
When we were lucky and could get a meal at 1pm, you could just ask the cook what he could do for you, depending on what he had, and he usually made it, in minutes - that's magic when all your thoughts are one something else.
I still remember - you've got fish today? Put some butter over it, fry it, then add me french fries on the side! Then 2 minutes the food come, it's good, and I start taking about the patient issues with a senior who also ordered specials: eggs, upside down, and a raw steak.
The stuff made by the cook, regardless of what it was, was simply better because it provided an emotional connection too. Even when it was conditioned in small portions for when the cook had to leave, it had been prepared by a team member we knew and truste to make the better with what was available.
There's no way to express that.
How you feel : you are tired, it's 1 or 2 am, you are hungry, you know you still have to work 6 more hours, and you are angry because of something - anything. The nurse misread something. A patient died. A test you expected wasn't ready - anything bad. You are concerned.
Then half the team go and share a meal in the break room, and it's like another world. The hassle goes away. You think about what you will do differently, thanks to the inspiration provided by these few minutes of comfort. And the guys or girls you had problems with, or even entered in a shouting match with - well, at that magic time of the day, everything is laid flat, and everyone understand and forgives. That's where the so called "team player spirit" grows.
The chef is not there, but his food made that happen. I still have my opinions about food, but a place with a 24/7 on site chef, that I could place a high value on.
Social groups like soldiers, ICU teams, police paramilitary units, firefighters and so forth tend to have similar social psychology dynamics. A good book to read on decision-making under extreme conditions is Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions by Gary Klein.
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One effect I've noticed from Leangains-style Intermittent Fasting is increased metabolic flexibility. Ie I don't need to eat breakfast and lunch and I function fine without them, because my body knows how to use more than one energy substrate.
Then again, my job is not very physically active, so that could be a confounding factor.
Each meal in Iraq cost about $45/person. Not sure what it was in Afghanistan.
You think food is bad? Look up the all-up cost for fuel.
Surf and turf (although food safety required them to overcook steaks) one night a week. Ice cream. Generally a line with lots of choices for entree. Mostly it was frozen stuff from the equivalent of Sysco, but mid-range, not the absolute cheapest it could be.
An order of magnitude better than MREs or the meals at US bases.
Absolutely none of it was from Iraq or Afghanistan; there was some bought from approved vendors in Kuwait/UAE and trucked/flown in. Fresh fruit and veg for Afghanistan flew from Bahrain 3-5 days/week.
The big improvement was putting RO water purification in country, rather than trucking bottled water (used for all potable use) from far away. The standard unit of water was a 12-pack of 1.5L bottles, later a 24 pack of 20oz bottles, or one level up from that, a pallet (you could just call a guy and have him drop a pallet of water on base anywhere you wanted).
Btw, I think everyone should read the essay about you, gives new meaning to in the trenches tech experience: http://www.rezendi.com/travels/bbbb.html
IIRC, the Kingdom of Kuwait actually donated a lot of the Jet-A/JP8, mogas, and diesel fuel used by the US in Iraq. But KBR charged about $2.50/gal to truck it from Kuwait to Iraq. It was about $1.50 to bring it from Turkey. Gas was subsidized by the Iraqi government and sold for $0.10/gal on the civilian market at official gas stations, but they had 4-8h long lines (which were dangerous targets), so a lot of people paid about $1/gal to guys with plastic bottles by the side of the road.
In this case a meal was the center of a transformation, but could another popular shared recurring activity have worked?
Say, for startups, a game room, or a pizza and trivia night?
Just to bring a personal anecdote why meals are less problematic: Trivia night would be the fastest way to push me away. I hate made up, faked up bonding events that have no other intention than to force me in a social gathering. At least try coming up with something creative, e.g. Lego night or something like that.
The bitch about it is, you can't say that to anyone or you sound anti-social. My skin crawls when I think about being forced to go to a "mixer" or a "meet up" or something like that. Growing up in a family where I was the only boy with 3 sisters (girls, of course, being known as the more "social" sex) and a mother who seemed to make friends with everyone, I am still scarred with flashes of awkward moments that happened years ago.
There are also plenty of things I enjoy doing which I wouldn't want to do with coworkers, for EoE/HR/etc. reasons. Or just because they're not particularly inclusive; if you have a team with a few 22 year old Mormons, a 45 year old ex-hippie, some bikers, "normal nerds", etc., the favorite activities of each aren't likely to overlap, but some kind of mutually fun things still probably exist. Meals are a pretty easy bet on a safe activity, modulo religious/dietary restrictions.
On anything. Rent a movie theatre for the team to watch a new movie. Buy a candyfloss machine. Pretty much anything.
The MSNBC article that is linked mentions the cause as being simply that the soldiers and Marines pulling security have to be the last ones there, so they need to start moving the support staff (including cooks) out earlier.
They're probably already almost maxing-out the airlift and sealift they're able to provide to take servicemembers and materiel back out of Afghanistan, which would give a plausible reason for why the cooks have to start leaving half a year in advance of the rest.
People quickly factor changes in conditions into their baseline (the hedonic treadmill); from that point removing a positive thing will only cost you. In many ways, it's better to be stingy in the first place (I think Machiavelli pointed this out).
What doesn't work is when you're downsizing and taking away things.
The example often cited in tech circles is when the free soft drinks fridge disappears or is replaced with paid drinks. Free soft drinks are quickly baselined; taking them away is destructive of morale.
I guess by "stingy" I meant that improvements should be chosen carefully. Where possible they should be sustainable indefinitely and be improvements that take longer to baseline.
That doesn't happen so much in the military. No one is going to switch to the losing side for relaxed grooming standards. :)
That said, it's not as though historical soldiery has always followed the current citizen-volunteer-soldier pattern we see today.
Answer: you don't. You can't. You basically have to make elaborate guesses and accept that you will be wrong a lot of the time, with all the concomittant waste that comes along with it. Especially since some such tradeoffs take decades to fully play out (eg. the JSF would be great in a war against an advanced industrial enemy ... which ... who?).
One example was a criticism of an Australian Institute of Sport study, where they took athletes away from their regular AIS places to do their training on top of a mountain, to examine if their perfomance improved on return. What they didn't do was send a control group to the same altitude as regular training - so there was no control for the spiritually rejuvenating effect of travelling somewhere nice and out-of-the-ordinary.
In the freezing cold trenches of WW1, you have to admit that would count for a lot, as a gesture.
Before he was a soldier, he was a civil engineer. Small armies create interesting leaders.
"Observationally: Cooks seem to put 10 or so basic meals into rotation"
More like exactly 19.
http://nsrdec.natick.army.mil/media/fact/food/UGR.htm
Also the characterization of the cook misses the point that the difference isn't the dude's motivational direction, but his effort. All .mil chefs I met tried their absolute best, its just "the best" is not so great in the sandbox without heroic effort, heroic effort as seen in that one E-5's efforts. As an Army REMF I always ate pretty well indeed.
Its interesting that the nicknames never change, in that you can change the name to UGR-B, or whatever, all you want, but the troops will eternally call then T-Rats as in tray rations (as far as I know they're still calling then T-Rats, maybe its recently changed)
Interestingly the average civilian doesn't eat all that many meals either. I've probably eaten a lot of grilled chicken caesars salad over the years. Homemade chicken fajitas with homemade guacamole last night, like practically once a month.