Culinary Specialists Serve Up Health to the 21st Century Sailor

By Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Alexandra Snyder, Defense Media Activity Pentagon Bureau, Navy

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md (NNS) -- Naval Supply Systems Command (NAVSUP) culinary specialists (CSs) from around the fleet showcased a wide variety of healthy and delectable dishes during several cooking demonstrations at the 2012 Sea-Air-Space Exposition in National Harbor, Md. April 17.

"We're trying to achieve healthy meals for the Sailor of the 21st century," said Cmdr. Danny King, Naval Supply System Command Navy Food Service director. "We want to feed our Sailors healthy, nutritious food that's of a great quality, and that's what is being demonstrated [with these demos]."

"Today's CSs have greater culinary instruction than ever before," said Commander, Naval Supply Systems Command (NAVSUP) and Chief of Supply Corps Rear Adm. Mark F. Heinrich. "With even more advanced training on the way, Sailors, both afloat and ashore, can look forward to even healthier and better-tasting meals in the near future."

Heinrich also emphasized "over-the-shoulder" training by senior CSs to junior CSs and the deployment more senior CSs to ships. "We're going to place a greater emphasis on over-the-shoulder training to maintain and increase culinary specialist skills, to maintain proficiency," Heinrich said. "Khaki leadership is key."

Chiefs oversaw and offered input to junior Sailors cooking meals such as peppercorn steak stir-fry and bacon-wrapped chicken with greens.

"It's a good time to be a CS in the Navy," said Senior Chief Culinary Specialist Nathan Jiggetts, senior instructor, Navy Food Management Team Norfolk. "We're now putting out healthier, cooked-from-scratch food to our Sailors, because healthy food means a healthy Navy. Not only that, but by creating homemade dishes, our CSs will be more equipped to be successful in their culinary careers when they leave the service."

Some of the initiatives being spearheaded by NAVSUP to help further facilitate this type of further career training include: benchmarking CSs against industry standards for culinary certification, revitalizing a hotel internship program in fleet concentration areas to pair CSs with top hotel chefs, as well as working to establish partnerships with culinary schools in fleet concentration areas. The command is also developing new recipe cards that provide step-by-step scratch cooking preparation instructions with graphic images detailing the steps of recipe production to decrease errors in food preparation and provide a better foundation for improving culinary training.

Other areas of emphasis include increasing the percentage of scratch food on carrier up to 40 percent and enabling greater fleet control and input with menu control.

"Nothing impacts Sailors on a day-to-day basis more than the food CSs prepare for them," Heinrich said. "CSs need to learn to prepare meals, not assemble them. We're embarking right now on a plan to see that our CSs can produce meals that match right up with the top chefs."

The Navy League's Sea-Air-Space Exposition is three days of seminars and demonstrations highlighting the latest maritime-related technologies and solutions. The symposium provides an excellent opportunity for Navy policy and operational leadership to interact with industry representatives to discuss and debate common interests and concerns.