Food
You may have noticed that there has been a lot of discussion about food in this travelogue. Some might even think that I have a food obsession. But I am not the only one; at any time of day or night, someone on the Picton Castle will be having a discussion about food.
Erik Newby writes of his experience as a trainee seaman on the Barque Moshulu in the book "The Last Grain Race". He also spends a lot of time talking about food: how people jealously guarded their private stashes of items brought or sent, and how ravenously they would devour them when a splurge was necessary.
I have yet to discuss this topic with commercial mariners, or with yachtsmen, but perhaps it is just something about travelling as a working crew member on a sailing ship that creates an obsession with food. Certainly, the sheer amount of physical work creates an appetite. When the crew assembled in Lunenburg for this voyage, the professional crew were way behind in the pre-departure maintenance schedule because of a problem with the dry-dock. We were all put to work on very physical jobs for at least 8 hours a day. Within a few days, the amount of food that we were devouring to make up for spent calories was already obvious.
At sea we work eight hours a day, but half of these is spent on night watch, where we mostly just try to stay awake. The other four hours is spent scraping, sanding, painting, chipping rust, scrubbing decks, mopping floors, cleaning heads (toilets), plus the people on galley duty make bread (quite a work-out to knead dough for eight loaves of bread), peel and chop vegetables, and wash dishes (or, in my case, cook everything). This is all quite physical work.
The other issue regarding life aboard a sailing ship is that one expends a fair amount of calories just staying upright. The constant motion of the ship requires your body's "core stabilization muscles" to be in constant use, Standing, sitting, or walking a straight line is way more work on a ship than on land.
What all this means is that working on a sailing ship makes you hungry all the time, and people eat a lot. We eat on a strict schedule in the day, and snack during the night. The food is quite plentiful--that is, with certain things--and no one goes hungry. My opinion is that the food quality was perhaps more variable than it could have been, and the provisioning was a bit unadventurous, but it is difficult to please the palate of 48 people all the time.
Breakfast always offered a selection of dry cereal, which we ate with reconstituted milk (not bad if the galley person mixed it correctly). If we had eggs, there were also often scrambled eggs, and there were sometimes muffins and pancakes. The last two were made from rather institutional-type mixes and so I lost my taste for both of them rather quickly.
Lunch was often soup and fresh bread, sometimes accompanied by leftovers from dinner the night before. The bread could be quite good, but because it was usually made by the galley assistants, the quality varied. Sometimes it was puffy and fell apart (too much yeast and not enough kneading), and sometimes it was heavy (started too late and not enough rising). The shapes were always interesting. The soups also varied a lot, and the cook had some novel recipes. The first time we had tomato, peanut, and canned peach curry soup it was an interesting challenge to the senses. The second and subsequent times it was avoided.
Dinner was hearty student-dorm food: spaghetti, chili, roast meat, pork chops, stir fry in wraps, and fried fish if we caught some or had been given some by someone from one of the places we visited. For some reason, a lot of things had canned corn in them (tuna salad, meat sauce for spaghetti and pizza?) and canned pineapple (I don't ever want to see a can of pineapple again). There were always plenty of potatoes (fresh, and surprisingly good instant mash), rice, and other starchy things that would make me put on a lot of weight on land, but had no effect while at sea.
During the night, there was an abundance of crackers and peanut butter, honey, and jam for snacking. There was also an endless supply of "Mr. Noodles" packages.
Mealtimes were announced by the ringing of the galley bell. The crew would start milling around the area where the meal was to be served (the stern, for breakfast and lunch, or midships and the main salon for dinner). At the sound of the bell, line-ups would form immediately and the food was heaped on plates, followed by a display of devouring as if it was the first meal eaten in a long time. No wonder that the crew was easy to please; food was treated as fuel rather than as a pleasure. Oddly enough, conversations about food cravings (i.e. not about what was being eaten) would carry on right through meals, as though people weren't even aware that they were eating.
Food conversations often concerned items that were not on board. If there was anything lacking, it would be fresh dairy products, since the Picton Castle did not have refrigerators (only freezers). Therefore, no fresh milk, yogurt, and limited cheese (though many cheeses do freeze well). Fresh vegetables were also a problem about a week out of port when we would run out of anything that could be kept in the vegetable lockers on deck (suitable only for root vegetables; even then, we had to constantly go through them to remove rotting potatoes, cabbages, carrots, onions, rutabagas).
For this reason, one of the constant cravings of the crew was for ice cream and salads (not together). The lack of refrigeration also meant that there were no cold drinks, which explained why cold beer and soft drinks were also desired (crew members had stashes of canned beverages that they would occasionally sneak into the freezers, but this was officially forbidden). The other category of cravings--which I did not share--was junk food. At "mail ports", some of the crew received requested care packages of potato chips, various chocolate bars, and jujubes.
If there was anything that I craved, it was to enjoy the act of eating, and to eat food that revealed its flavour. I have spent a lot of time studying the cuisines of various countries and have tried to replicate the beautiful simplicity of the Italian kitchen. I also have invested a lot of time in understanding various ways of cooking meats and vegetables, and recognizing when you want to roast, braise, sauté, steam, or poach to achieve a desired effect. We were not lacking many ingredients on the Picton Castle, and there was no attempt to cut costs by skimping on food. Every meal could have been an opportunity to delight the palate, but instead it was just a time to chow down.
I suppose that what I really craved was to choose what I wanted for any meal, to select the ingredients, and to prepare it the way I thought best. Such are the privileges of being an adult.
12:56:42 AM 
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