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Page 2 of 2 The Secret of Courageous Cuisine  When I called the Secret Garden Café, I was told that they were no longer a restaurant -- they had been transformed into a catering company due to high demand from guess who and were now strictly Courageous Catering and Special Events. I was also told that their operation was growing ever larger as Army reserve units craving courageous cuisine clamored for their cooking. But why, I asked a manager, were they so popular? The answer was simple:
"We get recommended a lot because we use, like real butter, and we bring really good desserts and we only use black angus beef… and so they like us, and we use, like name-brand sodas instead of generics, and all that kind of stuff, so they like us…"
Black Angus beef. Name brands. Top-shelf desserts. What's not to like? Recently, the Army Reserve's 374th Chemical Company procured Courageous Catering's services. For their inaugural menu, they roughed it with: country-fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, beans, corn on the cob with butter for dipping, fresh fruit salad, corn muffins with butter, sodas, bottled waters, iced tea, and assorted cookies and desert bars. Hold the chipped beef, but pass the Black Angus and those Milano cookies, Sir! Tommy Franks Rides the Rotisserie  In February 2003, U.S. News and World Report's USNews.com reported that then four-star general Tommy Franks actually liked eating MREs, but when he had his druthers he "noshe[d] at the Tex-Mex restaurant Chevys." CENTCOM commander Franks' crowning culinary moment, however, may have come the year before when the leader of U.S. forces in Afghanistan talked Outback Steakhouse CEO Chris Sullivan into shipping "6,700 steaks, 30,000 shrimp and 3,000 giant onions" and "13,400 cans of O'Douls" nonalcoholic beer to members of the 101st Airborne Division, based in Kandahar. The act garnered Outback some meaty press coverage, so it was perhaps not a complete shock when, after launching what turned out to be interminable campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, Franks decided to leave the military and take a spot (and the salary that comes with it) on the Outback Steakhouse Board of Directors. For years, America's military-corporate complex has been well known for its revolving door between the Pentagon and big-time defense contractors like Lockheed-Martin and Boeing. Tommy Franks may, however, have been pioneering a new incarnation of this old favorite -- think of it as the revolving rotisserie. And now he's not alone. In May 2005, just over a month after it was announced that Franks was enlisting in the Outback Steakhouse army, fellow former four-star general and ex-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell was the keynote speaker at the National Restaurant Association's annual conference. Today's military men and women are, it seems, eating up a storm at home and abroad -- from barbeque joints in Texas to a mystery eatery in Guatemala -- and you're footing the bill. They might even be making key contacts for the future. How long until some general leaves the military to join Shoney's? Or Tommy Franks tires of Outback and takes the Pig N' Whistle national? We're now living in the age of the military-gastronomic complex, so get used to it. Join up and eat up, or just hang on to the rotisserie for dear life because, like everything else the military touches, it's sure to spin out if control.  Nick Turse works in the Department of Epidemiology at Columbia University and is Associate Editor and Research Director of TomDispatch. He writes for the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Village Voice and regularly for Tomdispatch on the military-corporate complex and the homeland security state.
Copyright 2005 Nick Turse
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