How Aircraft Carriers Make 17,000 Meals a Day at Sea

An aircraft carrier has no grocery store, no restaurant and no quick way to restock. Yet in May 2018, Stars and Stripes reported that the cooks aboard the USS Harry S. Truman were making about 17,300 meals a day for roughly 5,500 people during combat operations. In this video, we look at the system behind those meals: the 114 cooks and seven galleys on the Truman, the Navy's 21-day menu cycle, storerooms loaded before deployment, resupply at sea by helicopter and cable, and the cold storage and water systems that keep it all running. A note on the numbers: the 17,300 figure comes from one carrier during combat operations in 2018. Other carriers, crews and missions will differ.