Life Lessons from the Chow Hall

Croutons do not belong in a Mexican Taco Salad.  Gyros tastes pretty good wrapped in a whole wheat tortilla.  Banana flavoured milk should be eliminated from the earth.  Polish sausage is 79% fat and considered a "low performance" food.  These are the important life lessons I've picked up from my compound's dining facility ("DFAC").

The Kuwaiti cow shouldn't be excited about banana milk

After a month, I'm consistently amazed by the variety of food that we get here--4 meals a day, all you can eat.  Recent options included: made-to-order omelets, salad bar, burgers, Eggplant Parmesan, steak/lobster (every Friday), grill items, you name it.  Sure, many people complain about the repetition (and, admittedly, the vegetables aren't sustainably grown on an organic farm)--but realistically, as the more forthright people will proclaim, "this IS Afghanistan!"

Supply chain consultants (Jordan) would have a field day mapping out how you consistently get fresh tomatoes on a daily basis to 25,000 people (on my compound alone) in one of the most far-flung locations on earth.  Earlier on, I suggested you look at a map--check again, and this time think supply-lines.  Do you use railroads, airplanes, trucks, or caulk the wagon and float it across (an Oregon Trail call-out for folks from my generation)? Factor in hostile neighbors.  Then add, oh, about 150,000 other foreigners to feed (outside our base); include all of the ammunition, weapons, and military equipment (we are fighting a war, people); don't forget about gasoline, furniture, mom's fresh baked cookies in care packages, etc, etc.  Yeah, pretty impressive.

Okay, now think at another level--virtually all of the pre-packaged goods are written in Arabic, meaning that they come from the Near East (mostly the Gulf states); but wait, reality check--how do they get mango sorbet, Coca-Cola syrup, and dairy products in small desert Emirates?  The reality is that even these supplies are simply shipped from elsewhere, packaged in the Middle East, then re-shipped to eventually land on my eager paper plate.

If you haven't given yourself a migraine developing a Microsoft Visio diagram yet, all I can tell you is this: somebody, somewhere is making a killing making sure that my buffalo chicken wings are crispy, my grapefruit is ripe, and my Iced Tea is properly sweetened.  I wish I were that guy.

Oh yeah, which brings me back to banana milk. Who decided it would be be a good idea to put banana flavouring in milk?  Probably the same dummy who invented banana flavoured candy, marshmallow Peeps, and black licorice.  In my democracy, I'm voting all of the aforementioned items off the island.