Plastic Cow
Posted: Fri Oct 29, 2021 6:33 am
This is the "plastic cow" story.
Before we went on a 40 day patrol (and I did six patrols) we had a huge load-out of stores that had to be hand loaded into the boat.
Perishable goods were loaded last and consumed first, because they weren't going to last.
The fresh milk was strangely a big deal in the U.S. Navy, at least on my boat it was. Like a fetish.
When the fresh milk supply was exhausted on patrol, the word would go out immediately through every interior communications circuit that "the cow died," and that we now had powdered milk on the mess decks, which was known as "plastic cow."
Our cooks, who were highly trained would get so frustrated at this. "It's the same thing" they would scream, and they were right, but that wasn't the point. It was a crew tradition that we would not drink plastic cow.
Before we went on a 40 day patrol (and I did six patrols) we had a huge load-out of stores that had to be hand loaded into the boat.
Perishable goods were loaded last and consumed first, because they weren't going to last.
The fresh milk was strangely a big deal in the U.S. Navy, at least on my boat it was. Like a fetish.
When the fresh milk supply was exhausted on patrol, the word would go out immediately through every interior communications circuit that "the cow died," and that we now had powdered milk on the mess decks, which was known as "plastic cow."
Our cooks, who were highly trained would get so frustrated at this. "It's the same thing" they would scream, and they were right, but that wasn't the point. It was a crew tradition that we would not drink plastic cow.