
How Meals Win Wars - rosser
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/06/how-meals-win-wars/276448/
======
guylhem
Disclamer - I don't really "enjoy" food, and I would happily live on soylent
green if it was available - to get done with it and save time. I don't know
how my personal experience may apply - a large university hospital is not the
army. But after reading the article, it reminds me so many things.

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.

~~~
chacham15
With all due respect, being a combat soldier and being a doctor are not the
same thing. I was a combat soldier and I have tremendous respect for doctors
and the difficult work that they do. There is a difference in the two jobs,
however. The critical difference lies in those moments when you need to
perform. What is on the line is your life and those of your friends, every
single time you go out. There are people who sort of turn off their minds, but
that is bad. Their reactions are dull and they are not thinking about possible
ambushes (or mistakes that they can make). The state that you are in at that
moment in time, you arent really thinking about what you had for breakfast or
that you are looking forward to that steak when you get back.

~~~
jacques_chester
I think he was talking about the formation of camraderie through specific
shared pleasant experiences under general conditions of very high stress.

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.

~~~
terry-a
relevant xkcd: <http://xkcd.com/810/>

~~~
jacques_chester
In which we learn that I am an artificial intelligence who enjoys reading, and
recommending to others, books on various topics.

beep boop viagra

------
rdl
The point of midrats is not "fourth meal", but "people don't work 9-5" -- it's
for when you work at night (becomes lunch), or have to leave at 4am (so it's
breakfast), etc.

Each meal in Iraq cost about $45/person. Not sure what it was in Afghanistan.

~~~
shadowcats
WTF? That meal cost seems insane. Did you fly in grassfed beef fillet every
day and have it prepared by ninjas or something? Didn't you eat the local
food?

~~~
jacques_chester
It'd be the all-up cost. Delivering sorta-fresh food to the far side of the
planet in regions where people try to blow up your food trucks is expensive.

You think food is bad? Look up the all-up cost for fuel.

~~~
rdl
Yeah, it was almost all transport and security and staff, not food. Although,
they did have some good food (it ranged from public high school at worst to
high-end corporate cafeteria at best; varied by base and time).

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).

~~~
shadowcats
That's fascinating.

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>

------
dmckeon
_That night marked the beginning of a transformation for the battalion of
soldiers. ... Sleepy midnight chow became a teeming communion of comrades ..._

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?

~~~
stfu
_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.

~~~
rdl
I think there's value in bonding events, but they should be bottom-up -- the
team should just pick things they collectively enjoy doing and do those.

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.

~~~
jacques_chester
Steve McConnell says Microsoft units were given morale budgets and expected to
spend it.

On anything. Rent a movie theatre for the team to watch a new movie. Buy a
candyfloss machine. Pretty much _anything_.

------
mathattack
Cutting food for soldiers in a crazy hellish warzone just seems pennywise and
poundfoolish. Even if you don't believe all that the article talks about, why
short change your million dollar soldiers on food that can make them more
effective?

~~~
mpyne
I don't think the reasoning here is related to money, for once. As I
understand it MREs are actually fairly expensive to procure through the
logistics system even in CONUS (something on the order of $10 each).

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.

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lifeformed
It seems like the military could easily raise morale a lot this way. They
already put so much money into the war, why not purchase one less $90,000
missile and instead fund a big comfort-food meal every other night?

~~~
chacham15
A missile has a better chance of saving that soldiers life than a smidgen of
morale. Speaking as former military, these perks are things that you get used
to (and thus dont really value much, especially food) and dont really do much
for you when your life is on the line.

~~~
lifeformed
But there are tons of those missiles. Are they in danger of running out?
There's gotta be a surplus of some ordnance that could be better spent as
food. I know the budget doesn't really work that way, but it's pretty surreal
how much money is consumed in a war. One bomb could put pay for a scholarship
for a lot of those soldiers.

~~~
jacques_chester
Military logistics is a hard problem. There's no market telling you what to
produce and in what quantities. How do you know in advance that it would be
better to have 30,000 mortar heads in your local base stockpile vs access to a
loitering B-52 two days in the week?

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?).

------
jacques_chester
Australia's most famous general, Sir John Monash, was famous amongst soldiery
in his day for ensuring that soldiers never fought without a hot meal.

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.

------
VLM
Not much research done by the journalist:

"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.

