The Weekend Intelligence: Mise en masse

0:03The Economist I went on a cruise once as a kid, a short one, a supposedly fun thing I'll never do again. I had no idea what I was in for. Going to restaurants was kind of a rare thing for us. Then suddenly two meal seatings a day, all cloth napkins and fawning service, plus buffets seemingly all day long. Oh, and at midnight. Truly it was the most I'd ever eaten, ever tried to eat. and I was amazed. How could there be this much food? Where did they even store it all? Weren't there insane amounts of leftovers? How did they have time to make the food and the Santa watermelon carvings and the elven ice sculptures that would melt before lunch?

0:49And could I really maybe just keep eating bacon indefinitely?

0:59I'm Jason Palmer and this is The Weekend Intelligence. These are the kinds of questions that occupied my colleague, Barkley Brown. Well, maybe not the infinite bacon one. The eating is a centerpiece of cruising. Sure, there's the bingo and the promenade deck and karaoke night and lounge singers and who's up for shuffleboard tomorrow. But all day, every day, and a lot of the night for many people, me too, if God help me, I ever end up on one again, a cruise ship hosts just one long eating contest. So, how?

1:46Baked potato, filet mignon, lobster tail, and vegetables. It's great. Surf and turf? Yeah, surf and turf. Cheese omelet, a little bit of bacon, sausage, a hash brown, and I was going to go for some mushrooms. I need some bread with that dipping sauce. I got the tiger shrimp with a vegetable medley and some rice. Lamb chops, steak, lots of choices. You can't beat the buffet also. I'm going to try Italian tonight. I'm standing in the middle of an improbably large buffet. All around me are stands of different foods stretching as far as I can see. I've already walked past a heaving bread section Replete with freshly baked sourdough A grill section with steak and lobster tails A seafood section with more lobster tails This time poached And towers of king prawns A South Asian curry section A gluten-free bar Fresh salad section And more More, more, more

2:54I've stopped near a ludicrously intricate watermelon carving, which has turned the fruit into a lotus flower. People around me are inspecting the shimmering options behind the glass sneeze guards, heaping their plates with so much food, you could be forgiven for thinking that this was their last meal. But it's not. This buffet is open from 6am to 9pm every single day. It's constantly refreshed with five. Get that five complete turnarounds of the offering. Breakfast, brunch, lunch, pre-dinner, and dinner. Have I been eating a lot? It's called a, you know, expandable dress. There's so many options.

3:35You've got to try everything, unfortunately. A fried egg and some corned beef hash. That's like beef with potatoes. More or less, it's like beef and potatoes chopped up together. You guys don't eat this? I've never seen that before. No way. That'd be a better podcast, doing one of those. Whoa. I have a crepe. This is my first time eating a crepe. It's your first time eating a crepe? What's inside the crepe? Strawberry and Nutella. Oh, OK. It's going to be delicious. And banana. Oh, it's going to be delicious. Yeah. You know my honest opinion? It wasn't all that. Some people aren't really here for the food at all.

4:11What's been your favourite thing you've eaten so far? I'll let you know after I eat. No, I mean in general over the three days. I don't know. I've been drinking a lot. But me? I'm definitely here for the food. Because what makes this particular buffet so special is not its scale or quality, though both are impressive. What makes this buffet special is that when I look past the buffet and out the floor-to-ceiling windows beyond, What I'm looking at is a perfect horizon line sliced by the still calm waters of the Caribbean. This buffet is on the world's largest cruise ship, Royal Caribbean's Star of the Seas.

4:53And it's just one of over 26 dining venues on board. Collectively, the chefs on board make 100 ,000 fresh meals a day. And they do it to order. These are not airplane-ready meals. The meat is butchered, the fish prepped, the bread baked, the potatoes peeled and cut into fries, the meringues beaten, the tart set, the creme brûlée. All on a ship, moving in the open ocean. And I'm here because I want to find out how they do it. Over and over again.

5:33Hey, nice to meet you. I'm very excited today. Sorry for the wet hair, but I was enjoying the Bahamas. Chef Gary Thomas is wearing chef whites, more blazingly white, even than the sandy beaches of the Bahamas. He gives me a strong handshake. It's easy to be intimidated by him, not least because I've turned up scruffy, my hair a salty mess from having just been in the ocean. This is not his first cruise. I originally came for two weeks, and 17 years later I'm here. It's also not his first rodeo with a journalist. Everybody wants to meet the chef. Everybody wants to try and get their head around how you do 100 ,000 meals a day in multiple venues, floating in the middle of the ocean.

6:17That is, of course, why I'm here. And as the person responsible for those 100 ,000 meals today, he's the person I'm hoping will explain it to me. Not only because he's actually responsible for more than just 100 ,000 meals being cooked on the ship today, because he's the culinary director of the entire Royal Caribbean fleet. That's 29 ships and two exclusive destinations on land. Altogether, he manages thousands of chefs. There's a science to everything that we do and an art to what we do. I will talk you through both sides of it. But today he's here on Star of the Seas, doing the rounds to make sure everything is going according to plan.

6:55And you can see as much as the kitchen's radically. He walks me into a vast stainless steel kitchen Its surface is gleaming. Hey chefs. Hi chefs. Hi chefs. Hey, here you go. Good stuff. Every day he does tastings, going through the day's menu to ensure that the cooking is up to scratch. He's lined up his chefs and their dishes are in front of them. So this is all of the station heads that run the stations, the pastry chefs, the baker. The soup cook? This guy's been a soup cook for how long? 20 years. 20 years. 20 years. There's nothing about soup that this man... I've tried to get him on other stations.

7:39And he just won't do it. He's just a soup master. What do you love about soup? I love the soup. He likes to make it. Pastry, where are you? Pastry. Pastry, chef. The kitchen we're in is attached to the main dining room. That's not the buffet from earlier. No, the main dining room serves an a la carte menu that changes every night at the sailing. It's spread over three decks, and they turn the tables three times in an evening. So the system that we have, it's when the dining room doors open, that's when the butter is already being picked up. Once we see the breads go, that's when we start getting the hot appetizers ready.

8:24You know, the bread's going to the table. The waiters are coming back within a few seconds. So then bam, bam, bam. That's when we start with the hot appetizers. It's choreographed with the precision of a ballet. We now know then get the steaks on the line. So the roast cook, two roast cooks. One is on the steak line, just cooking the steaks. The other roast cook is bringing them and placing them on the hot line in medium well, medium rare, depending on. And then each waiter will come in and tell us what kind of steak that he wants. So you will average anything between 1 ,500 stakes to 2 ,500, depending on the size of the ship between the three decks.

9:00So we average, on any given day, anything between 1 ,000 to 15 ,000 pounds just of protein a day. 15 ,000 pounds of protein is equivalent to three full-sized rhinoceroses. Assuming you ate everything, horn to tail. That is a lot of chicken to debone, fish to skin, lamb to braise and short rib to glaze. And it's all prepared by our butchers by hand. The only thing we don't have is a live cattle farm downstairs. I'm almost surprised at this, because this ship does seem to pretty much have everything you could possibly imagine. Star of the Seas is longer than the Eiffel Tower is tall. It's got 20 decks, rising to a height of 60 metres above sea level.

9:53It weighs the same as 17 Brooklyn bridges. It has two 18-metre-high stunt diving boards, two escape rooms, two arcades, a nearly 700-metre running track, a theatre capable of putting on a Broadway-style musical, seven swimming pools, a wave simulator for surfing, and a Category 6 water park.

10:15I'm not really sure what categories 1 to 5 are, but at Category 6, the slides take you over the side of the ship and back again. For research purposes, I slide down some of the slides. There's even a dry one I can take my recording equipment on. Whee! A common topic of conversation on board is the latest thing a person has stumbled across. I don't even know where the ice skating rink is. Somebody told me there was a casino. I said, I didn't know. I know. I had no idea. That's the thing about cruise ships. They're getting bigger and bigger. More like floating cities than nautical craft. If you thought COVID might have killed the cruise industry, you'd be wrong.

10:59Royal Caribbean's stock price hit an all-time high in July. In 2023, Royal Caribbean generated nearly as much revenue as the Bahamas' entire GDP. The ship I'm currently walking around, it reportedly cost over$2 billion. We're on one of the inaugural sailings of the ship. I've been involved now. This is my 16th largest cruise ship in the world that I've opened. So this is now the largest cruise ship on the planet. I've been in this position 16 times. Crazy, eh? I can't imagine how big they'll be if Gary makes it to his 20th largest cruise ship in the world, or how much food they'll get through.

11:41Food is central to the appeal of modern cruise ships, as many of the other guests on board were quick to remind me. So do not eat before you come, get on a diet before you get on this ship, because you will gain some pounds here if you don't do it right. So the days before, try not to eat as much, clean out your system, be ready to go, because the engines start the moment you get in here and the food is endless, as you see. And you can get as much as you want. Come on, you can't go wrong with getting free extra food. So that's important. Stay healthy. Royal Caribbean wouldn't tell me how much of their revenue comes directly from dining, but it's clear that it's a huge moneymaker for them.

12:21That's because not all the dining areas on the ship are complementary. There are speciality dining areas where the food is premium and more expensive. There's an omakase sushi bar, a fine dining jazz bar that costs$200 for a multi-course tasting menu, an Italian spot with hand-rolled pizza dough. There's an upmarket steakhouse so fancy they turn me away for being dressed too shabbily. How do I look? No, it's all good. It's all good. Nice shirt. And then there's the chalice. That isn't the name of a restaurant. I mean a genuine, solid gold chalice. It is the only store in the world that offers Royal Caribbean branded jewellery.

13:01One morning, I stumble across a party. We have gold balloons, a DJ, everyone is carrying champagne. It's 11am in the morning, but that hasn't deterred anyone. It's outside a jewellery shop called Royal Bling, which sells diamond-encrusted Royal Caribbean merchandise. Can you tell me about the hat you're wearing? I don't know anything about it, they just put it on me. Oh, it's like a gold hat with a giant dollophan. That's right. It means bling, baby. It means bling, baby. It's my drip. Some people are here for the jewelry. Oh, it's bling. Royal bling. I mean, it's the fashion thing of the decade.

13:37I mean, royal bling. Okay, so you've got earrings. I've got earrings. I've got the bracelet. I've got the ring. The woman I'm talking to is wearing a ring with the Royal Caribbean logo glistening against the sunspots freckling her hand. The earrings are black and silver, and the bracelet also features the Royal Caribbean crown and anchor logo. We are wearing it every day. And you think about the wonderful time you've had on the cruises. How much do you think you've spent on Bling?

14:06Probably$9 ,000. If you didn't catch that, I asked her how much she'd spent all in on Royal Bling. She said$9 ,000 and counting. To be fair, that's pocket change compared to the chalice. It's a solid gold cup studded with imitation diamonds. If you buy it, you can drink unlimited drinks for life on Royal Caribbean ships. Can you tell me how much the chalice sells for you? What? How much did the chalice sell for you? Only$100 ,000. And if you buy the chalice, you can drink for free for life? For the rest of your life, yeah. Amazing, wow. You might buy to it for$80 ,000. For$80 ,000? For me, wow.

14:42I don't drink alcohol, so$80 ,000 seems like a lot of money to spend for unlimited water.

14:59There are a lot of things on Star of the Seas that scream illogical exuberance. I was only here two hours ago, but everything has changed. So it is now lunch service. So gone are the croissants. And here we have, what have we got? This looks like five different types of bread now. cheese, soft rolls, baguette, cheese and tomato spiral rolls, soft roll, rye bread. We've got tuna spread, egg spread, hummus, herb butter, pesto sauce, tapenade, beer versed, goat cheese, honey mustard dressing, grilled asparagus, tomato salad. And to make that possible, are hundreds of chefs working 24 hours a day in rotation.

15:43As I was circling the Windjammer buffet, trying to get my head around it all, I met a food blogger from Miami. He's the guy who told me I should have gone on a diet before I arrived on board. Rami Kamano. Rami Kamano. Yeah, yeah, R-A-I-M-Y-C-A-A-M-A-N-O. He was pacing along the buffet, camera in hand, filming panning shots of the food. I'm a chef. I like to cook. I have a food truck. There's so many things that I do. We bonded over how impressive the setup was. Over and beyond, I mean, it's not hectic. Like, I was going crazy at mine, you know, because you've got 70 people in your window and you're trying to flip a burger.

16:16These guys are so well-coordinated that it's, I mean, their behind-the-scenes here is amazing. If you see the way they keep the food fresh and they keep shifting around and feeding how many of us in here? There's 3 ,000, 4 ,000, 5 ,000, 6 ,000 here today or something. And the way they do it is I never see anything empty. Everything is completely full at all times. They're always stressed, sweating, tired, or, like, at all. Me, it was three orders, and give me a minute. These guys are completely calm. The way they're operating it is amazing. I guess the back wheel in the back is keeping things ready to go.

16:50I could imagine Chef Gary nodding, all in hand.

16:58There is a reason why everything is so impressive, seamless, that back wheel constantly spinning. To explain how Chef Gary is able to prepare this amount of food at scale, it's better to start not here at the Limitless Buffet, but rather in 19th century France. To understand Chef Gary, you first have to understand the man who is often considered the godfather of the modern kitchen, Auguste Escoffier. Born in 1846 to a poor family, Escoffier was sent to work in a kitchen at the age of 13. The environment he found himself in was a world away from the gleaming calm of the kitchens on Star of the Seas.

17:37In the 19th century, kitchens were unruly, full of drunks, noise and chaos. Cooking was an artisanal fare. A chef was responsible for a meal, and he would cook all the components of it. Fights would regularly break out around Escoffier, and he was bullied terribly, as chefs would barge each other around to get access to the stoves they needed to cook on. Escoffier worked his way up the ranks and ended up cooking for seven years in the army, including during the Franco-Prussian War. It's here that many credit his evolution. Drawing on the hierarchical system he saw in the army, he refashioned the kitchen, The brigade system came to define modern cooking.

18:18Chefs would be split according to components of dishes, rather than whole dishes, and plates would be assembled by a senior chef. In this sense, the Escoffier kitchen mapped another 19th century innovation, the factory line and specialization. After the army, Escoffier honed his system when he started working with the hotelier Caesar Ritz. To make the system work, you needed a calm environment. Escoffier's chefs were banned from drinking and were told to keep quiet. Communication is key to ensure that all of the different sections are working in harmony to produce the end product. Do you want to have a look in the butcher shop really quickly?

18:53Chef Gary wants to show me this system in action. OK, let me take you in the butcher shop. I'm watching a man bandsawing giant pieces of meat into individual portions of steak. I've been a chef for 36 years. I will not go near that. There are many jobs that I'm grateful I don't have to do, and using a bandsaw on a moving ship in the middle of the ocean is definitely one of them. He's cutting all the steaks now, ready for tonight. Those steaks will get marinated this afternoon, and then get sent up to the main galley, the three distribution galleries, to the roast cook. Then the roast cook takes the lead on them.

19:31So the butcher is entrusting the roast cook to look after his steak that he spent all day preparing. That's the factory line in action. The bulk butchery is done down here, in the bowels of the ship, before the prepped steaks are shipped off to the individual kitchens elsewhere to be dealt with by the chefs in charge, whether on the buffet, in the main dining room, or in the speciality steakhouse. To prepare the final dishes in each of those venues requires many parts of this machine coming together, and for the chefs to ensure that they are completely prepared before service and have enough of each prepped ingredient ready.

20:06For professional chefs, this is called mise en place, to have everything in its place.

20:35When Chef Gary was starting out, you worked out your mise en place intuitively. But expecting all of the chefs on board to be able to guess exactly how much of any particular ingredient they might need to prepare for any given service is a recipe for disaster. And waste. So today, Royal Caribbean uses a sophisticated proprietary AI-powered ordering system called Crunch Time. The system crunches together a bunch of things. It looks at how much people have been eating on this particular sailing so far, and then cross-references that against other sailings. It's so accurate, it can tell the chefs they'll need 1 ,422 portions of calamari tonight.

21:14People often believe that the job of a head chef is about making sure the food is delicious and served on time. But that's just what the guest sees. What makes and breaks a restaurant is exactly this, ensuring you neither over-prepare nor under-prepare. Getting your mise en place right consistently is the only way restaurants survive with their razor-thin margins. Food waste is not at the end for us. It's all about managing it at the front end. Chef Gary can't do much about guests taking three slices of cake and a chocolate mousse and not finishing it all. But he can make sure that in the kitchens they're working as close to the actual demand on the ship as possible, that the system is dialed in.

21:54And the stuff that inevitably goes to waste? Well, they incinerate it, and it powers that Category 6 water park. The stakes of getting this system right are high. In 2023, the top three cruise lines spent around$2.5 billion on ingredients alone. That's a lot of inventory to manage. And that monumental task falls on Randy Nicholas. It's already 6.30, right? What they said is early is on time. On time is late. And late is unacceptable, that's how it goes. It's 6.30 in the morning on my third day on the cruise, and I'm standing in the bowels of the ship with Randy. Randy is wearing a white captain's uniform with lapels.

22:37His hair is neatly parted to one side, without a single hair out of place. Like a lot of the staff on the ship, he's from the Philippines. We're standing by one of the loading docks of the ship, down in the crew-only area, far beneath where most of the guests are still sleeping. Beyond him, I can see the sun rising over the Caribbean, Clouds hemmed a light hibiscus as the day comes into focus. He checks his watch as pallets of food are driven past us on forklift trucks. From both ships, we have 11 ,000 on the island. They're unloading the ship to stock up the bars and restaurants on Royal Caribbean's private island.

23:12Perfect day at Coco Cay. 90 % of the food served on the island is prepared on the ships the night before, meaning all the chefs and crew have been working overtime through the night for this moment. We dock next to another Royal Caribbean ship, Symphony of the Seas, which used to be the largest cruise ship in the world only a few years ago. Together, the two ships will disgorge over 11 ,000 people onto this tiny private island. Randy is in charge of making sure this process goes smoothly. Because we cannot delay the ship. Once the ship gets delayed, all is a domino's effect. Right? The captain needs to use more fuel, need to burn more fuel, because we need to increase his speed just to cup up, or we're going to get delayed.

23:57The mise en place for the ship, that starts down here with Randy. You can't cook if you don't have ingredients. I load at least 1.5 million. 1.5 million for seven days. 1.5 million dollars? Dollars for seven days. 1.5 million dollars is a lot of ingredients. Randy is not afraid of a spreadsheet. More than 25 ,000 lines of items. 25 ,000? Yep, 25 ,000 lines of items that you need to scan one by one. Then I need to do that at least twice a week. The thing with the ship that makes his job much harder than running a regular restaurant is that, as you might expect, it operates in the middle of the ocean.

24:39You can't just send a chef to pop down to the local supermarket if you've accidentally run out of eggs. You have to make sure you have absolutely everything you'll need before you set sail. So everything, all these perishables with dates, need to study more or need to focus more. Because you are, let's say, it's hard to make a mistake. Because or else you will end up plenty of spoilage, you will end up plenty of expiry items. Because that's why this one is the one when we're focusing, when we're placing the orders. Ordering is one thing. The other is storage. Where do you put all of these 25 ,000 line items worth of products?

25:20The loading bay is off a giant corridor that is called I-95. Remember that I said the ship is longer than the Eiffel Tower is tall? Well, I-95 runs the length of the ship, over 300 metres of straight road. Off it are giant fridges and freezers. so i'm in the fish freezer which is 210 square meters and it has these giant kind of corridors of fish that you can walk down and the boxes are stacked basically up beyond the height beyond my height so i'm walking past tilapia tail on pacific white shrimp lobster tails the fridges are divided by product type to ensure that there's no spoilage and no cross-contamination, which is important for passengers who might have allergies.

26:12Randy understands this process intimately, both from an inventory perspective and from the other side as a chef. I was the first time when I hired, 22 years ago, I was a utility. Then after a year, I moved up on the galley, I was a chef, right? However, I told to myself, this is not my passion. That's when he moved across and started working on inventory, before they had the fancy AI systems. He would count boxes by hand, marking items off on a clipboard. I always say, you know, captain is the brain of the ship. Ship engineer is the heart of the ship. We are the blood. It's easy to think of Randy, standing before me in his gleaming white uniform, as one of the many cells coursing their way through the arteries of the ship, the seldom seen but crucial elements the ship can't do without.

27:05The unsung heroes is our galley stewards and the galley utilities and the guys there washing the dishes. You think about, you think, everyone asks about the food, but nobody asks about the plates. Well, just hold this thought, right? So when you go to a buffet area on a ship, or even in the dining room, it's very rare you see people with one dessert. So think about those numbers. you'll see two, three desserts on a plate, especially in the buffet areas. No one just has one of anything. I asked Royal Caribbean how many plates there are on board the ship, but they couldn't give me a number. I guess it was a lot to ask to get someone to count them.

27:47However many there are, everything is kept to an extreme level of cleanliness. Norovirus outbreaks can destroy us sailing. Just in April this year, the Queen Mary 2, a luxury cruise ship saw 266 passengers fall ill. That can cause serious reputational damage for a cruise company. The biggest case for Royal Caribbean was back in 2014 on their ship Explorer of the Seas. 630 passengers fell ill then, as well as 53 crew. They had to cut the sailing short and issue full refunds. That's why today the chefs do such an intense cleaning protocol. The cruise industry and cruise ships in particular, that.

28:28They're as clean as any hospital. I mean, you can see it for yourself. Gary literally runs a tight ship. It's spotless and you wouldn't want to try to get anything past him. As we walk through the ship together, I can see how switched on he is, how aware he is of everything happening around him. That goes not just for the chefs and culinary teams. It even extends to me. Have we lost your photographer? I think we lost her. It's nice to see that she's an important part of your day, eh? I noticed, but... I know she's bubbling around. Oh, she's bubbling around? I've only been with Gary for two hours, and already he's giving me notes to improve my performance.

29:10Of course, there's only so much that Gary can control behind the scenes. One of the biggest disease vectors on the ship is the passengers themselves. That's where Washi Washi comes in.

29:29Before you enter the buffet or any of the self-service dining areas on the ship, you're greeted by these guys.

29:38They're affectionately called washi-washy by everyone on board, including themselves. They usually come in pairs. Today, they're both from the Philippines, and they wear cowboy hats and giant sashes like they're in a beauty pageant. The woman has huge braces that catch the light as she sings.

29:59Where they're dancing is flanked by sinks, and you're supposed to be lulled by the washi-washy crew into washing your hands thoroughly, killing any germs you might spread to other passengers. The washi-washy team maintains a level of pep and enthusiasm I'm pretty sure was bullied out of me by the age of 10 at school in the UK. How do you get your job? Do you have to do an audition? No, sir. No. They pick us. Because they want to, you know, entertain. We love to entertain guests. Right? Watching them dance for hours at a time, maintaining a superhuman smile and the immeasurable reserve to grin and bear this while hundreds of passengers stop to point and take videos of them, I couldn't help but wonder what it was like to do this day in, day out.

30:44Yes, sir. We don't have day up. Wow, that's hard. Yeah. Sometimes 10, sometimes 11, sir. Long days. Yeah. You look hard. Every seven months, no break. Yeah, we don't have zero. If you didn't catch that, they work every day for the entire length of their contract. Contracts last seven months or eight months on average. Some are longer. But I'm very big on work-life balance, especially on cruise ships. It's important. You know, these guys are away from their families. We work seven days a week. Next time you complain about your work-life balance, spare a thought for the kitchen staff at sea trying to figure out the life part of that equation while working seven days a week for eight months straight.

31:26The majority of the chefs working in Chef Gary's kitchen are from emerging market economies, countries like the Philippines, Indonesia and India. Royal Caribbean's headquarters is in Miami, but the company is incorporated in Liberia, a country not exactly known for its strong labour laws. When I toured the ship with Chef Gary, I was flanked by PRs. I couldn't ask the average chef's difficult questions. But after I left the ship, I contacted a number of current and former chefs for Royal Caribbean. They'd worked on similar vessels to star the seas. Very few were willing to go on record. They were scared that it might harm their future careers.

32:04Some who were currently on sailings told me they had asked HR and were told they couldn't speak to me. But despite that, some did want to tell me their stories. I thought that it would be great to live where you work. You can literally wake up 15 minutes before you start of your shift and just work. Ali is from the Philippines. This is a pseudonym as she didn't want to risk reprisal for speaking about the conditions she experienced. She'd worked in five-star hotels in Manila and in America before she joined Royal Caribbean. It was like very naive of me. What I didn't realise is that it also meant they could just like call my cabin at 6am and ask me to go to work.

32:51The work was intense and all-consuming. The thing here, like what I told my friends is I have to schedule my breakdowns. I can't even, like I don't have time to pry. Because like you want to sleep, you want to do your laundry, there's like too many things you have to do that you don't have time for that anymore. Ali tells me that she constantly worked overtime. Her first contract was eight months. It was the longest eight months of my life. It's also a difficult social environment. Relationships on cruise ships are like very intense because they're literally around each other like 24-7. You work with them, you eat with them, you sleep with them, that kind of thing.

33:30One that is particularly hard for women. Yeah, because like the guys in the kitchen, what me say is it's as though they haven't seen girls in like years. that kind of thing. They would hit on any girl, all the girls, whoever. Ali says she was sexually harassed by one of her superiors, a sous chef who trapped her in a walk-in fridge one night as she was packing away. He just like, cut me off. And I was like, I like you. I was like, what? And I just continued, just like, I wasn't sure I heard him right. And then he stopped me again. And he said, i like you and i was like uh okay and then i tried to make my way out of the fridge but he blocked the way and i just i didn't know what to do anymore like i froze and like it just like occurred to me like who am i gonna ask help from if anything happens and this guy has like a high position and who's gonna believe me i'm literally like the bottom like every level kind anything.

34:30And yeah, that's why I just, I don't know what to do in that moment. I felt trapped until he was like, okay, like I really had to push my way out. And then I ran. She didn't report the incident to HR because she was too scared about the fallout. Not just from the chef himself, but all of the people around him. She was stuck with them. They lived cheek by jowl. It's hard being away from home, too. One of the challenges of speaking to junior chefs for this story is that the ones that are still on the ships are only given limited access to the internet for free. They get two hours of internet free a week, which they understandably don't want to waste talking to me.

35:15They have families they want to call, and social media they want to scroll through to keep up with the lives they've left behind. They can't buy more internet, but they're charged$4 an hour. I asked Royal Caribbean about the internet allowance through their spokesman, but they didn't want to comment on it. Ali was a pastry chef. She actually got promoted on her last contract. Those endless rows of immaculate cakes on the buffet, that's Ali. If you don't mind me asking, like, so what were you paid? One, one. $1 ,100 per month. Per month? Wow. Okay. To work day in, day out, sometimes over 12 hours a day.

35:54If you do the math, it's around$3 an hour. Ali was paid less per hour than the internet would cost her. To be fair to Royal Caribbean, that's more than Ali would be paid at home. It was double her salary from a five-star hotel in Manila. That's why she was there and why the others came too. And did you ever get to go off the ship or were you just on the ship the whole time? You know, our break time is in the afternoon. So what we usually do is we would do advanced production, do overtime the night before, just so we have less to do the next day. So if we're going to go out, we really have to plan it.

36:32It's very hard to do it. She did manage to make it off the ship once in her last contract. My memory of Rome is just getting off a cab, running, taking a photo, running back to the cab, going to the next destination, get out, run, photo. So people say like, oh, but your photos look good, you look so happy. And I'm like, dude, it wasn't like a very, a very nice experience, very Instagram versus reality kind of thing. The harder thing for Ali wasn't the world slipping past her cabin windows. It was the scale of the work that really got to her. I lost my passion for baking. We were producing thousands or hundreds of thousands of food every day.

37:18And imagine it's the same menu every week. And we're on this shift eight months. So I was just like, I barely had a taste of dessert during those months because it wasn't appealing to me anymore. It killed cooking for her altogether. I haven't been in the kitchen for, ever since I quit. Ali burnt out. But she's lucky. Another chef, who I'm calling Lin, saw what can happen at the most extreme on one of her contracts. On Harmony, my second contract, somebody hanged herself with a shower. So, you know, when something like that happens, when someone dies actually in the ship or a medical thing, you will hear alpha, alpha, alpha and the location.

38:11She told me this triggered a wave of suicide attempts amongst the below deck workers. She saw a chef nearly drink himself to death. He was medically signed off and sent home. She said the ship went into a kind of mental health lockdown. The rule was that time was if you hear someone, even like suspected someone being depressed or saying things like, I can't do this anymore, I want to go home, blah, blah, blah. They get reported. And because they got reported, they would be like surveillance. The hell. Like there will be a security guard outside of their cabin and they cannot work. They're going to be like surveillance.

38:52When I brought this to the attention of Royal Caribbean, They said through a spokesman that our crew are an important part of our organisation and their wellbeing and safety is our number one priority. We have comprehensive security measures, hiring protocols and training and we comply with all US and global laws and regulations to do right by our crew and guests. Chef Gary doesn't dispute that it's a hard life. But it's no secret that as a chef there's nothing easy about it and especially when you're preparing 100 ,000 meals a day across one ship. And as a chef, you're only going to get promoted if you show the criteria for the promotion, which is hard work, dedication, and the skills to get there.

39:36And it is very difficult to climb in the culinary world. Gary left Liverpool when he was just 18, and he worked his way up the culinary world in some of the best kitchens in Britain, including La Gavroche and The Ritz, literally treading in the footsteps of Escoffier. Gary tells me that he used to keep a tattered copy of Escoffier's manual on him at all times in the early days. For many years, for 20 years, you know, I was that chef, you know, eating my dinner in the kitchen every night and getting back to it, you know, 15 minutes a week, back to it, bam. You know, that was my life for six days a week for many, many years.

40:12He has the intensity and drive that means you can easily imagine that he could have been the CEO of a Fortune 500 company or a tech billionaire. But in cooking, he's built something similarly impressive, even if it's not often seen that way. There are no Michelin stars here on the ocean, and Chef Gary is a bit too gruff to be a polished influencer. We're not a joke. We are a serious business and we can challenge anyone. Those chefs over there, I'll put them in any kitchen on the planet. Same with the guys in the back there. There's not a kitchen on God's planet, whether it's Michelin star level, beef burger level, hot dog level, doesn't matter what it is.

40:50I've got a 6 ,000 strong plus army of chefs like that that I would take with me anyway. Into any kitchen, into any culinary environment and I know we can turn it on when we need to. But to get to this point has its costs. Not just for Gary, but all the chefs in front of house and pot washers. That back wheel grinding away. Sacrifice is a good thing. It builds character, it makes you stronger, and it makes you want the stuff there. But then sacrifice doesn't help you get it back. You can't get back yesterday. I used to be a chef before I worked at The Economist. I never got near the level of Chef Gary, but I worked in a number of successful restaurants in London.

41:34I didn't have the dedication he's talking about, the willingness to sacrifice everything else for the craft. I think the system Gary has built is one of the most advanced food systems in the world. I know what he means about that particular grind. I was shoving food in my mouth in a stairwell and running back to tend a deep fat fryer. I also knew chefs who were burnt out, who struggled with drug addictions and mental health problems. I've seen female chefs drop out of the industry because of the constant harassment. But I can't imagine doing that job and not hanging up my apron and going home at the end of a shift.

42:08I can't imagine doing that at sea for months on end with no break. The service industry is based on the premise that you're working when other people are having fun. Are you about to sing happy birthday to someone? Congratulations. She's got 100 ,000 TikTok followers. Congratulations to you. Congratulations. Congratulations. Congratulations to you. A cruise ship is the ultimate expression of the restaurant industry more generally. honed to its most impressive and streamlined form. That means both the good and the bad.

42:54So, grapefruit for breakfast, a little bit of fruit for breakfast. I am eating nachos with cheese and jalapenos and meat sauce and chicken. The scrambled eggs, hash browns, pork sausage, bacon, and I have no idea. Yeah, I had some of the Jamaican food. I had some plantain, the oxtail, and the goat curry. Did you see the spread the first day, the lobster and the shrimp and the seafood heaven? I felt like I died and went to seafood heaven. It was so good. I'm back at the buffet watching people pile their plates high. I'm a cruise person. I told my kids when I die, just cremate me, put me on one ship and then come the next day and move me to another ship.

43:37Literally. Wow, you love cruising. I do. It's the last morning and I'm doing my rounds, asking people about what they're eating. Some people are even starting to recognize me. I literally, I saw you at the port and I go, that man's European. I was like, your hair, those are the longest legs I think I've ever seen. It could have been the professional microphone and the intensity with which I've been staring at people's plates. Beyond us, I can no longer see the azure blue of the Caribbean. We're at port now. I can see huge storage sheds at Cape Canaveral and a large expanse of Florida car park.

44:17People are getting their last breakfast in while they can. Some of them even have their suitcases with them. And as they start to leave, you can see the back wheel in action. The staff composed, working their stations, packing down, scooping the last of the buffet items into buckets to be incinerated.

44:36They have a long day ahead of them. They'll pack their stations away, wipe down and reset. Then another 6 ,000 guests will arrive, and they'll do it all again.

45:08Thanks for cruising with us. Head chef was Barkley Bram. Sous chef, Cy Versailles. Chief engineer, Nico Raufast. Captain Gemma Newby. I'm not sure I can keep this up for much longer. Fact-checking by Rachel Horwood and Ian Emery. Oh, and before you ship off, one more moment of your attention. The Weekend Intelligence now has its own feed, which means you can go back and listen to all 100-plus of our episodes in a neat, searchable way. To celebrate, we're publishing this episode as free, along with last week's, the Cotton Patch Gospel, about a man who stood up to the KKK. If you know someone who might enjoy this or any other audio story we've told this year, you can now share them via the Economist app, including with non-subscribers.

45:51click the share button and select give as a gift. We'll see you back here on Monday.