From Military.com:
“A Navy
Veteran Exposes the Gross Food Served on Warships in a Viral Facebook Post”
(Photo of moldy
pita bread from a Facebook page displaying examples of questionable food being
served on U.S. Navy ships.)
A Navy veteran
has posted pictures and videos capturing the rotten, unhealthy, and quite
frankly disgraceful food that sailors and Marines are forced to eat while
embarked on the service's warships. The compilation of nauseating imagery, most
of which were taken aboard multiple surface vessels, includes pictures of
lettuce with insects, hair on food, and raw chicken, among other egregious
examples. Kevin Selfaison said he documented the awful food over a period of
three years. Many of the pictures and videos were taken aboard the aircraft
carrier USS Nimitz, on which Selfaison served from 2017 until 2020, but there
are also videos and pictures of disgusting food from elsewhere in the military,
including the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt.
"I want
people to know about this -- and I want somebody higher than me to know about
this," Selfaison, a former petty officer second class, told Task & Purpose.
"On a ship, if I were to report this, the highest it's going to go is to
our captain. And there's no way our captain is going to turn around and tell
his superior: ‘Hey, the food on my ship is f---ed up;' because they're not
going to rat on themselves like that." When asked about the imagery that
Selfaison posted on social media, a Navy spokeswoman said the service takes all
reports of poor food aboard ships very seriously.
"We cannot
confirm the authenticity of the photos posted by the sailor," said Lt.
Emily Wilkin. "Nimitz was awarded the 2020 Captain Edward F. Ney Memorial
Food Service Award for best aircraft carrier food service and our standards for
cleanliness, service, and food quality are extremely high. The health and
wellbeing of our crew is a top priority." Wilkin also said the Navy
leaders often perform spot checks of food and the cleanliness of dining
facilities, and sailors are encouraged to report issues with their food to
their chain of command or provide anonymous feedback by using suggestion boxes.
According to
Selfaison, however, sailors' options for reporting rotten food are so limited
that the Navy leaders who could actually fix the pervasive problems with the
food served to sailors are not seeing what needs to be done. Selfaison also
said he waited until he left active duty on Oct. 3 to post the imagery of the
gross food on Facebook so that the Navy could not retaliate against him. "There's
no way it would still be on the internet now if I was still in the
military," Selfaison said. "I would have been forced to take it
down." Not every meal Selfaison received during deployments was bad, he
said. During holidays and Sundays, the chow was decent, showing it is possible
for the Navy to prepare food correctly. But overall, the quality of the food
served while he was underway was consistently poor, he said. "It's always
like cold or it's burnt -- or it's burnt but cold on the inside. Like, it
doesn't make sense," Selfaison said. Whatever standards are supposed to
apply to Navy food are simply not being applied, said Selfaison, who noted that
if aircraft maintainers did their jobs as poorly as the sailors in charge of
preparing food for crew members, they would be held responsible for falling far
short of quality assurance standards.
Since he posted
the evidence of unhealthy food served by the Navy, Selfaison has heard from
older veterans who have said that food in the military has always been poor, he
said. Selfaison has countered by asking them why the standards for food served
to service members be that low. "It all has to do with quality of
life," Selfaison said. "I feel like: When we're out there, a lot of
times all we have to look forward to is a meal -- and when that meal is as
messed up as some of these meals, it's messed up. It kills morale."
^ Being a Military
Brat these reports and pictures sadly do not surprise me. When you have seen firsthand
(or hear the reports) of mold and other issues on Military housing across the
US and around the world having moldy and gross food served by the US Navy or
any US Military Branch is not that far-off. If the US Navy and other US
Military Branches actually took this health issue seriously then Soldiers,
Sailors and Airmen/Airwomen wouldn’t fear retribution for showing these
disgusting evidence to their superiors or to the public. I don’t blame
Selfaison for waiting to show this evidence until after he left the US Navy. We
can not expect those in the US Military to risk everything – including their
own lives – if we give them unhealthy, moldy housing and food. It’s time the
President, Congress and the Military wake-up and fix these disgusting, unhealthy
and demoralizing problems that have long-plagues the Branches. ^
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