Food prevents crew members from fully integrating, perhaps more than anything else on large ships. Access to ‘home food’ at sea varies dramatically because ‘home’ varies dramatically. Some cruise lines have more Indian, Eastern European, or Caribbean dishes, depending on crew composition. Fortunately, cruise lines take crew food very seriously. It’s the real deal, unlike, say, the food court in the old strip mall. Sure, you have Mexican, Italian, and Chinese food, but only through Taco Bell, Sbaro’s, and Panda, respectively. And those, of course, are hopelessly Americanized. Before international corporations, I doubt that native Mexicans, Italians, or Chinese would have recognized such foods as ‘theirs’, especially after eating them. But I digress.
Strangely, the ships cater to American tastes below the waterline, despite the scarcity of them on board. The irony is complete when you realize that nearly 100% of said Americans are artists who won’t eat anything they’re provided with. Why? Because hot dogs and hamburgers don’t lend themselves to attractive bodies. So why, then, do the ships bother? Because hot dogs and hamburgers are cheap. Even better, they can both sit under a heat lamp for hours and you’ll never know. Or at least an Indonesian guy wouldn’t. Mystery solved.
But every day on every ship of every cruise line on every sea is Asian day. Copious amounts of steamed white rice are always available for breakfast, lunch and dinner, bowing to the preponderance of the East Asian crew. I’ll never forget my first trip to the crew mess, on Carnival Fantasy. While I piled a couple of steaks on my plate (I’m just American), my colleagues opted for a mound of white rice topped with a ladle of fish head soup. This explained our radical disparity in weight and, perhaps, in temperament.
Fortunately for me, I am deeply interested in food and have found that different cuisines from different cultures have benefits. Many did not. Considering how hard we all work, the desire for a familiar, comforting meal was understandable. Also, most of the crew came from rural backgrounds with limited diversity and limited interest in it. Just as a small-town kid from, say, Kansas may not be as interested in foie gras as a New York City native, a small-town kid on an island in the Philippines may not be interested in burritos. of microwave. And after working more than 80 hours a week? Let the poor have what he wants, for crying out loud!
But the real reason foreign crew members hesitate to join is not food: it’s eating habits.
Food is not allowed in the crew cabins, though all types of crew sneak out sooner or later. Many keep a ready supply of dry goods, some of which are even allowed on occasion. Asians, for example, tend to hoard entire bowls of instant noodles, and who knows about a hidden hot plate that allows for a late-night snack? But this food-restricting maritime discipline was enacted for good reason. Two, actually, because on some ships there are cockroaches.
The real reason food is denied in crew cabins is because it invariably ends up in the toilets in a very unbiological way. Ship toilets are very, very sensitive. The gang? Not so much.
When we were working on Royal Caribbean’s Majesty of the Seas, we had to deal with this last problem to the extreme. Fish bones filled the sewage system so frequently that the entire aft crew deck reeked of feces. Literally. What killed me was that getting rid of evidence of illicit feeding was the only time many flushed the toilet! I still cringe at the sight of overworked zombies brushing their teeth next to overflowing toilets with their lids open. Equally confusing to me was why a crew member dropped a shoe. This resulted in the entire ship’s waste systems being backed up, with none other than the hotel manager himself being forced to search the cabins for the culprit. There will be more on that later, but I will add that he cursed a lot that day.
Despite all this, some of us on board have access to room service. However, that doesn’t mean the crew is happy to provide it. One night my order for several sandwiches (I was hosting a party) resulted in a loaf so deeply impressed by an enraged chef’s thumbs that I could almost see his fingerprints.