Getting Up on My Soapbox

Posted by The Editorial Desk / Wednesday, July 8th, 2009

It’s not often that I read something that gets me fired up enough to call out another writer, but enhancing an inaccurate stereotype of a group worth respecting is reason enough for me.

Let me be clear in saying that my purpose is only to correct the stigma most food writers and civilian chefs have towards military chefs and pointing them out when I see them.

The target of my angst today is Washingtonian food blogger Melissa McCart and an article she wrote for Gourmet magazine about soldier-chefs taking courses at a local D.C. culinary school, Culinaiere.

Full disclosure – for eight years, I was a military chef. And as a former military chef, I was offended by Ms. McCart’s portrayal of military chefs as cooks forced to rely only on their hot sauce to get by. More importantly, several of Ms. McCart’s claims are just plain inaccurate.

“But Army cooks only have one cooking school available to them — the Quartermaster Center and School, based in Ft. Lee, Virginia — and it offers a choice of just two courses: Basic Skills Training (also known as IET), during which they learn culinary and baking skills for 10 hours a day over the course of eight weeks; and Advanced Culinary Skills Training Course (ACSTC), which emphasizes knife skills, menu development, buffet platter production, table service, and purchasing. While Quartermaster courses provide basic culinary training, career cooks such as this crew found themselves hungry for a deeper understanding of ingredients, flavor dynamics, and cooking techniques that their classes hadn’t had time to cover.”

Yes, Ft. Lee does have one culinary school with both the Basic and Advanced skills programs. However, Ft. Bragg, the base these soldiers are assigned to, has an Advanced Culinary School of its own, taught year round by an American Culinary Federation (ACF) Certified Executive Chef. Additionally, Ms. McCart fails to properly check the accuracy of her source’s information when she quoted Master Sergeant Arthur Vernon as saying:

“It was difficult to convince the Army that a civilian cooking school was good for our unit, since it’s expensive and somewhat of an experiment,” but he argued that improved skills would cut down on waste, saving the Army money. His request was funded. As far as he knows, his group is among the first cooks at Fort Bragg and elsewhere to formally train among civilians.

While it was kind of Ms. McCart to qualify the quote with “As far as he knows,” a quick google search would prove that military chefs have been formally trained among civilians for several decades now. Heck, two paratroopers from Master Sergeant Vernon’s Ft. Bragg, N.C., unit just finished a training program at a local country club.

Several points need to be made here; first, there are numerous units locally and around the world who work hard to give their soldiers the best training possible. Locally, an over whelming majority of military cooks in the Washington D.C. area have at some point been sent to a civilian culinary school or apprenticeship for more training. Additionally, Stratford University was teaching culinary classes in kitchens at the Pentagon, Ft. McNair, the Naval Yard and Ft. Myer as early as 2000. One local Air Force unit has a partnership with several Northern Virginia restaurants that allows the airmen to train in those kitchens for several weeks at a time. And finally, the Army as a whole has sent numerous soldiers to train at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., at no cost to the soldier. (Heck, even Bobby Flay came to Ft. McNair in 2002 to do a post-9/11 show on military chefs.)

I’m not even going to get into the fact that the Army has an annual Culinary Arts Show; an Iron Chef-like competition that has been covered in the past by the Food Network, where teams of cooks come to represent their base in numerous static and live cooking competitions judged by ACF judges. Or that the Army Culinary Arts Team (USACAT) has dominated culinary competitions worldwide for several years.

The bottom line is this, yes, it’s great that the chefs from Ft. Bragg were able to take classes at Culinaiere, but military chefs are not what they used to be. Even in a combat environment, culinary skills are trained and nurtured by good leaders. While it is true that many meals in combat environments are ready-made, those too can be enhanced by talented chefs, not just hot sauce.

-Stephen Ball

Tags: American Culinary Federation, Bobby Flay, Culinaiere, Food Nation, Food Network, Ft Lee, Ft. Bragg, Ft. McNair, Ft. Myer, Gourmet Magazine, Melissa McCart, Northern Virginia Magazine, Stephen Ball, Stratford University, US Army, US Army Culinary Arts Competition, US Army Culinary Arts Team, Washingtonian Magazine Food Blog