HOW AIRMEN FEED THE U.S. AIR FORCE
Culinary specialists with the Coast Guard prepare meals with the highest standards of nutrition, taste and food safety and also are responsible for logistics, accounting, menu planning and inventory management. Culinary specialists may work ashore at stations, at VIP facilities, or they might be assigned to galleys on cutters. “We teach the same curriculum that you would get at any culinary school, but we have to do it in a more condensed timeframe because we have to get people out to the fleet, so our program takes place over the course of 13 weeks,” Chef Fuchs says. Culinary specialists can continue their education on the job as a line cook (or duty cook) while also learning “firefighting, navigation, line handling, rigging and all those other skills necessary to be successful on a cutter. If you’re an honor grad for a graduating class, you’re going to get your No. 1 pick, and then so on down the line depending on how well you perform in your school. With our advancement being performance driven, you can advance to the next pay grade through continued study and performance on the job.” Essentially, Coast Guard enlistees — after completing eight weeks of boot camp — have a choice to go directly into culinary or they can choose to pursue a different rating, Chef Fuchs says. Any degrees from an ACF-accredited culinary program that an enlistee already has completed could count as an equivalent to a Coast Guard training program and even have that enlistee signing on as a culinary specialist second class (E5). Located in the Two Rock Valley of Petaluma, Calif., the Coast Guard Training Center operates seven schools with courses for health service technicians, electronics technicians, information systems technicians and culinary specialists. Guard launched an ACF-approved apprenticeship program and earlier this year had its first graduating class. “We graduated 14 culinary specialist third classes, but also members from the Filipino Navy, who received their [Certified] Fundamentals Cook certification,” says Chef Fuchs. This is required in order to earn the rank and rating of a culinary specialist third class (E4). The culinary program is so rigorous that just last year, the Coast
ACF Chef Jazmen Davis , technical sergeant, CWPC, oversees culinary instruction for the U.S. Air Force at Fort Gregg-Adams in Virginia and enjoys teaching new recruits the fundamentals of cooking. At Fort Gregg-Adams there are two main kitchens, including a demo lab for basic culinary instruction that lasts about a week. “Then we take the training wheels off and have everyone take a menu and feed about 60 people at a time and then switch them to a bigger kitchen,” says Chef Davis, noting that her team teaches about 900 airmen per year and can have between 60 and 80 students in a class. “By the time they leave their duty station, they will know how to do batch cooking and mass cooking, and they will also spend time in our field kitchens.” Within six months students might have “I enjoy getting people excited about food because I think when people join the military, especially the Air Force, they think they’re going to jump out of planes and do things like that, so many of them are shocked when they get assigned the job of cooking,” says Chef Davis, explaining that this military branch is different from others in that airmen are assigned jobs — they don’t choose them — and they rotate frequently. their first deployment, so they’re trained not just on cooking but also on airplane mechanics and other duties.
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