Australian cooks providing meals for hungry Soldiers

Pfc. Marcus Fichtl/8th Military Police Brigade, 8th Theater Sustainment Command

SHOALWATER BAY TRAINING AREA, Queensland, Australia — Australian military cooks from across the nation are filling the bellies of U.S. and Australian troops during Talisman Sabre 2011 at Camp Growl and across the rest of Shoalwater Bay Training Area.

Throughout July, several chefs will prepare and serve thousands of hot meals during the exercise for troops inside Camp Growl and many others in the field.

“We serve meals for 1,500 troops here at Camp Growl,” said Australian Defence Force Pvt. Kim Krzyworenka, 1st Combat Service Support Battalion. “Eight hundred of those meals are to-go trays that get delivered to troops in the field.”

With nearly 5,000 meals to serve in a day, the cooks at the dining facility never have a moment of rest. Kilos upon kilos of carrots, onions and meats must be processed, cleaned and prepped before Camp Growl’s residents wake up, because the cooks must send their first breakfasts to the field. Up before 3 a.m. and continuing on through day’s end, the cooks are packaging their last dinner-to-go plates and preparing for another early morning, even as Camp Growl’s residents are turning in for the night.

Many may view the job as thankless due to the long hours and high expectations, but cooks like Krzyworenka see it as a labor of love.

“It’s great seeing the smiles on all the troops that walk through our lines,” he said. “I know it’s because of what my mates and I have cooked up, and hopefully, it will power them through another day.”

For the U.S. Soldiers of the 4th Infantry Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, those smiles are genuine.

“The food here is amazing,” said Sgt. Carl Holm, with 2nd Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment. “I don’t know if it’s because the food is different or because of the variety of good food that they serve, but everyone here is loving it.”

According to Camp Growl’s cooks, this exercise is allowing them to meet cooks from different ADF units. This allows the cooks to get together and learn from each other by sharing recipes and techniques on how to best serve their troops when their individual units move out during training and combat operations.

One such technique, a massive assembly line using nearly 20 cooks, pumps out hundreds of to-go plates in mere minutes, while still serving the regular line customers.

“When we’re in the assembly line, we turn into a food-serving machine,” Krzyworenka said.

As the to-go plates move from the assembly line at the Camp Growl dining facility onto trucks heading to the field, similar trucks leave Australian-manned dining facilities around Shoalwater Bay Training Area, ensuring the roughtly 23,000 U.S. and Australian troops of Talisman Sabre are fed hot meals.