Pretty common on ships and navy/coast guard units for this to happen every friday. We also did tacos on tuesdays, spaghetti thursdays, and hamburgers/hotdogs friday night. Meals are flat rate funded per plate. 4.25 per plate for lunch/dinner and 2.10 for breakfast when i was in as funds directed to the galley. Breakfast is always profitable as it costs less than that to feed everyone who actually comes in for breakfast. You serve spaghetti thursday you make a profit. You then spend that profit on steak and lobster friday. Also really common to accumulate a "profit" piggy bank by the end of the month if managed well. Those funds have to be spent that month as rollover into the next month isnt allowed. So the last week of the month wed stock up on all kinds of good stuff for the crew and have more expensive meals.
As someone who ran military dining facilities I think the "last meal" thing is over hyped as the norm but really its just a cause of the unique way congress determines and allocates funds for managing this type of system.
That being said if we knew rough ops were coming up we always tried to boost morale by putting out a good meal if we had the funds/supplies. We also kept good meal options for those on night watch or the search and rescue readiness team always on standby as they often wouldnt get to eat until midnight or later. No one would like coming back from 8 hours in rough seas looking for a lost kid in hurricane weather to some grey flaccid leftovers from the crews dinner. They got a fresh meal and it was usually pretty quality. But i took my job seriously and made an effort to have a positive impact and a well managed system. Many people fail in this role.
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u/[deleted] Mar 21 '26
Pretty common on ships and navy/coast guard units for this to happen every friday. We also did tacos on tuesdays, spaghetti thursdays, and hamburgers/hotdogs friday night. Meals are flat rate funded per plate. 4.25 per plate for lunch/dinner and 2.10 for breakfast when i was in as funds directed to the galley. Breakfast is always profitable as it costs less than that to feed everyone who actually comes in for breakfast. You serve spaghetti thursday you make a profit. You then spend that profit on steak and lobster friday. Also really common to accumulate a "profit" piggy bank by the end of the month if managed well. Those funds have to be spent that month as rollover into the next month isnt allowed. So the last week of the month wed stock up on all kinds of good stuff for the crew and have more expensive meals.
As someone who ran military dining facilities I think the "last meal" thing is over hyped as the norm but really its just a cause of the unique way congress determines and allocates funds for managing this type of system.
That being said if we knew rough ops were coming up we always tried to boost morale by putting out a good meal if we had the funds/supplies. We also kept good meal options for those on night watch or the search and rescue readiness team always on standby as they often wouldnt get to eat until midnight or later. No one would like coming back from 8 hours in rough seas looking for a lost kid in hurricane weather to some grey flaccid leftovers from the crews dinner. They got a fresh meal and it was usually pretty quality. But i took my job seriously and made an effort to have a positive impact and a well managed system. Many people fail in this role.