ARMY FOOD GETS A MAKEOVER

A CELEBRITY CHEF IS ENLISTED TO OVERHAUL THE DREARY MESS HALL MENUS THAT DRIVE MANY SOLDIERS TO LESS-HEALTHY CHOICES

- STORY: ALEXANDER NAZARYAN / NYT

US Army food has been vexing and perplexing the soldiers who have to eat it for about as long as there's been an Army.

An age-old marching song describes a biscuit that "rolled off the table and killed a friend of mine". Troops in World War II immortalised a much-reviled beef dish with the nickname SOS, an acronym that still can't be translated in this newspaper.

And at lunchtime recently, a mess hall at Fort Jackson in South Carolina was serving up tacos filled with nondescript meat that glistened with grease. The Brussels sprouts had the green boiled out of them. The hall itself looked bland and dated.

But just steps away at Victory Fresh, a small, sleek fast-casual cafeteria that shares the mess-hall kitchen, cooks were pulling individual-size pizzas from a US$45,000 (1.5 million baht) Marra Forni oven. The brisket had been cured and charred on-site, then carved to order. Dessert included narrow wedges of cheesecake, marbled missiles of sweet cream cheese cut with bitter chocolate.

The celebrity chef Robert Irvine, who opened Victory Fresh last year, was finishing his lunch when a towering figure in fatigues marched up. The soldier, who introduced himself as Sgt Maj Joshua R. Bitle, declared that in 28 years in the military, he'd never eaten as well as he just had.

Then a note of exasperation entered the sergeant's voice. Why, he asked, wasn't there a Victory Fresh on every base? "Nobody has given me an explanation for why we can't do it."

Irvine, the onetime star of the Food Network shows Dinner: Impossible and Restaurant: Impossible, knows what those explanations might be: logistics, funding, institutional inertia. But he thinks the moment is finally right to change the Army's food culture. And the Army has decided that he is the man to lead that charge.