Celebrity chef Robert Irvine said he wants to get healthy “grab-and-go” food options to bomber pilots and crews working on the flight line.
“In most bases, but specifically Barksdale [Air Force Base] on the flight line where these maintainers and operators work, there’s nothing to eat,” Irvine told Task & Purpose on the sidelines of the Military Influencer Conference in Tampa, Florida, last week. “There’s nowhere for them to go because it takes a while to get to somewhere to eat.”
Irvine said the idea came from a recent trip to Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana, where he met B-52 Stratofortress Bomber crews and pilots who flew combat missions as part of Operation Epic Fury against Iran.
“Those guys who did Epic Fury, they’re flying with any type of missile or nuclear weapon,” Irvine said on stage at the event. “They have no food. They have a little little oven… and they’re drinking Monster Energy and things like this. Why are we doing that?”
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Irvine has partnered with the Army to revamp enlisted dining halls and remodel them off of college cafeterias with healthier food options. Over the last year, the service has opened new dining halls at four bases, with others planned in the future.
Irvine’s projects have extended to other parts of the military ecosystem, and with his latest vision for flight line troops, the celebrity chef said his goal is to get “grab-and-go, healthy-style salads, poke bowls, that kind of stuff in those areas before Christmas.”
“I’m not saying that we have to give sushi to 19-year-old kids. I’m not saying that. But what we have to do is give them good food,” he added.
Irvine’s team told Task & Purpose that the idea is still in the early stages. A spokesperson for the 2nd Bomb Wing at Barksdale confirmed that Irvine and his foundation visited the Louisiana base in September for an event with hundreds of airmen.
“We look forward to working with Chef Irvine and his team on innovative ways to continue improving quality of life programs for our Airmen,” the spokesperson said.
The grab-and-go concept comes on the back of similar changes across the service for healthier food options at pre-made food kiosks and to-go ordering at dining halls.
It’s unclear how the grab-and-go meals would be different from food offerings at flight kitchens located on Air Force bases near the flight line. But Chris McGhee, a retired master sergeant and former F-16 crew chief, said flight kitchens generally have simple menus with more processed food, and serve troops in a fast-food-style line that moves quickly.
Oftentimes, service members don’t even sit down and eat because the workload and amount of resources aren’t built for that. He said sometimes if a group of airmen did want to go to a flight kitchen or dining hall, they would all load up in a truck to drive over, pick up their food, and get right back to work.
“There’s not going to be an opportunity for a maintainer to sit down and eat because there’s not enough time in the day for that luxury,” he said. “I had a long engine run; I would bring my food up in the cockpit with me because I was already sitting. So I would be monitoring gauges and then eating.”
McGhee said that by the nature of the flight line’s location and mission, food options are scarce.
The flight line, as its name implies, covers runways and the hangars and other facilities where crew perform aircraft maintenance and inspections.
“The flight line is more of a food desert than the base as a whole because the access to a broad food selection is necessarily curtailed because of the logistics and hours of operation and all these sorts of other things,” McGhee said.
If airmen don’t bring any meals with them, they could go to the unit snack bar — which is mostly packaged or processed food items like chips, muffins, or candy bars. The revenue from the snack bar goes back to the unit to pay for things like retirement gifts or unofficial outings, he noted.
“Oftentimes because of the lack of hours in the flight line kitchen, the snack bar is — probably outside of what people bring from home — is the sole source of food for aircraft maintainers deep into night shifts, and the snack bar is essentially stocked with junk food,” McGhee said. “There’ve been initiatives previously where they were trying to get fruit in snack bars, but fruit rots. When your snack bar’s primary goal is revenue generation, losing money is not a good thing and so what are the things that aren’t going to rot? Bagged, processed food.”
Task & Purpose attended the Military Influencer Conference. The Military Influencer Conference and Task & Purpose are owned by the same parent company, Recurrent Ventures.
