Meat Only, Please

The tabletennis competition
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One of the officers said “meat only, please” after the steward told him today's dish. So he got his plate full of meat only. Other crewmembers never eat vegetables and so the steward sees to it that the mighty stuff never makes it on their plate. Finally, there is the Philippine crew who only work when they get rice with their meals – whatever the meal is.

The dishes are always the same but always different. The common denominator is some type of meat in or with a sauce, a type of vegetable and potatoes (meat three times a day, vegetable and potatoes twice). What changes is the meat, the sauce, the vegetable and the way the potatoes are prepared. In my eyes this is heavy German food for heavy workers – high protein and fat content. Probably the perfect food for about half the people on board. The Philippinos get the same food (plus rice, of course) except when the cook thinks they wouldn't like that German type dish – as he is Philippino himself this is an easy guess. Then they get something Philippine.

Be a Sportsperson - or Becoming One

The darts competition
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The normal crew (i.e. non-officers) make up a bit more than half the personnel on my container ship and consist of Philippinos only. The officers are mainly from Eastern Europe (Poland, Russia, Ukraine), one is German and one is Philippino. That's why sometimes a Russian dish sneaks onto the menu – once in a while Russian officers taught the cook a typical recipe. The cook also started doing the potatoes Rösti-like after we had explained him this typical Swiss thing. The cook is really good.

Competition of the minds
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But what is it about the sports-person? Okay, walking up and down the stairs in the ship's superstructure for every meal and coffee break and maybe also for a look or a book on the outside improves one's fitness compared to everyday life. However, walking up and down the stairs is by far not enough to compete with the food, which is just too delicious to resist. Instead of waiting to get challenged by my weight – which is not a good idea due to the lot of stairs anyway – I started to think about it. However, stairs plus thinking was still not burning enough calories. Surprisingly, I decided to start sports (about one hour every day), stop eating meat for breakfast, drink fruit juice to increase vitamin input and eat chocolate to improve happiness :-) I probably ate on this freighter trip as much chocolate as in the whole past year.