There is a maxim in the cruise-ship industry that the average passenger gains a pound a day while on board.Photograph by Brian Finke

As I left the restaurant, I reflexively patted my pants pockets, checking for my car keys, and tried to recall where I’d parked. Then I remembered: my car was more than a thousand miles away, at an airport lot in Newark, and I was on a cruise ship travelling to Florida from the Bahamas. The ship, Royal Caribbean’s Oasis of the Seas, is so massive that its motion is usually imperceptible to anyone who isn’t looking overboard. Above me on either side blocks of staterooms with inboard-facing balconies rose like apartment buildings, and the walkway I was standing on was flanked by trees and shrubs. Stars were visible overhead, but I couldn’t see water in any direction.

Oasis is the second-largest cruise ship in the world; its sister ship, Allure of the Seas, was built from identical drawings but came out a couple of inches longer. Each ship can carry more than six thousand passengers and twenty-one hundred crew members, and each has approximately the same displacement as the United States Navy’s largest aircraft carriers. Before we sailed, from Fort Lauderdale, I assumed that most of what I’d be eating onboard would have been mass-produced onshore, as is the case with airplane meals, and that food preparation at sea would be heavily microwave-dependent. In the early nineteen-nineties, my wife and I took our two kids on a four-night Caribbean cruise—a trip that, in family lore, is not counted among our spring-break triumphs. We were assigned to a dining table with another family of four, and my main memory of our meals is of the adults making awkward conversation while the children chewed sullenly. The food was mostly stuff that not even a boarding school could get away with now: a sad-looking salad with a single cherry tomato in the center, a fish fillet as rigid as tree bark. Even so, eating and drinking were the main activities onboard. The ship’s amenities included a snack bar at which soft-serve ice cream was available around the clock, and I did not doubt the cruise-industry maxim that the average passenger gains a pound a day.

Since then, America’s global reputation for gluttony has, if anything, increased. At the same time, though, we have become more adventurous and, in many ways, more demanding about what we gorge on. Chefs are the stars of television shows, and the widespread infatuation with locally produced ingredients has been very good for people who grow kale. Dining opportunities on my Oasis cruise reflected contemporary trends. The ship had twenty-three dining venues, among them a sushi-and-ishiyaki restaurant, an Italian trattoria, a restaurant featuring six-course seasonal menus developed by Michael Schwartz, and a cupcake shop. (At most of these, the food was included in the price of passage; a few added a surcharge.) The ship also had twenty galleys, including a butcher shop that supplied all the dining venues, a bakery that never closed, and a prep kitchen near the storage rooms in which workers did nothing but wash, trim, peel, and slice vegetables. Virtually everything I ate had been prepared on the ship, using fresh, unprocessed ingredients. The ship’s cooks even made items that reasonably fancy restaurants buy frozen, such as vegetable and meat stocks, which they reduced in huge tilting receptacles called Bratt pans, and bath-towel-size sheets of dough for apple strudel.

Many of the dishes I tried were ambitious. Chops Grille, the ship’s steak restaurant, featured a seasoned-bacon appetizer—thinner but more irresistibly molten than the similar item at Peter Luger. The tapas sampler at Vintages, a wine bar, included butter-soft piquillo peppers stuffed with cream cheese and feta, and sautéed balsamic-marinated baby onions. The onions had a brownish glaze that made them look like scaled-down Krispy Kreme doughnuts, and they fell apart when I cut them with my fork. Like everyone else, I’d been assigned a table and a dinnertime in the ship’s main dining room, called Opus—which has three levels and accommodates more than twenty-three hundred passengers during each of two evening seatings—but I was free to ignore my reservation. Electronic displays near the ship’s passenger elevators showed how much space was available in each of the dining venues, generated by infrared sensors that monitored the body heat radiated by the people currently eating.

Oasis, like other very large cruise ships, feels less like a nautical object than like a shopping-mall food court with swimming pools on the roof. Yet something about being at sea must weaken the inhibitions that normally prevent people from topping off a huge restaurant meal by sprawling on their bed and calling room service. A person who, on land, can walk past an auction of Thomas Kinkade prints without regret may be helplessly drawn to one in the Boleros Lounge, on Deck 5, across from Starbucks. Maybe oceans exert a powerful transformative force that affects you even when you can’t see or feel or smell the water, and makes you hungry.

The executive chef on my cruise was Lorenzo Dearie. He has a shaved head, penetrating green-gray eyes, and the build and disposition of a rugby player. He was born in northeast England in 1972, began cooking in a pub when he was fifteen, and held a succession of restaurant and hotel jobs in London, Scotland, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, Canada, and New Zealand, where he has lived since the late nineteen-nineties. He went to work at Royal Caribbean seven years ago. “To have three hundred and fifty people working for you is a lot of fun,” he told me. We met in the Café Promenade, on Deck 5, and to get from there to the ship’s service area we first had to cross a pedestrian plaza, which was crowded with tortoise-paced, plus-sized people carrying cocktails and beers. “I can’t walk slow,” he said, when we became stalled, momentarily, behind a wandering bride and her attendants. (Oasis averages two or three weddings per cruise.) Dearie moved through the crowd awkwardly, like a child learning to ice skate. “This is killing me,” he said. “I’ve got twenty outlets to check, and I check them three, four times a day. I usually run.”

We moved faster once we’d reached I-95, a two-lane employees-only corridor that runs most of the length of the ship, on Deck 2. From there we climbed a service stairway and crossed a corridor to the ship’s largest galley, which serves Opus. Everything in it was sized for giants: ovens, soup kettles, an automated pot washer large enough to wash a washing machine. Dearie’s staff was preparing for the first dinner seating. A long stainless-steel serving counter had been divided into sections for the evening’s ten entrées, each of which was marked by a labelled photograph: pork, grilled salmon, beef sliders, lobster. (Oasis passengers eat a metric ton of lobster during a typical seven-day cruise.) The Opus kitchen has one executive chef, five executive sous-chefs, eleven sous-chefs, fifty-five chefs de partie, four demi-chefs de partie, and a hundred and sixty-eight commis, or range chefs. Members of various ranks are distinguishable by their uniforms, including neckerchiefs in different colors.

“The desserts are over there,” Dearie said. “You see the tiramisu? Opus will go through at least forty trays tonight, on the three decks.” For the past few weeks, he said, one of the ship’s restaurants had been serving a new item, devised by a colleague: cheesecake lollipops, baked fresh each day. Later, in the ship’s pastry galley, I watched a cook popping new ones from a molded silicone baking sheet and arranging them on a tray. They were shaped like miniature pies, and had been made from scratch, including their graham-cracker crusts. Dearie said, “When we first rolled them out, we had sixteen or seventeen hundred kids on board, and we were going through fifteen or sixteen hundred of just this one item every single day.”

One of the few exceptions to Royal Caribbean’s made-fresh policy is French fries. “If we made them ourselves, we’d need four or five guys doing nothing but pushing potatoes through a cutter all day,” Dearie said. Handmade fries, furthermore, droop quickly; the frozen fries the ship uses, like the ones served in many fast-food restaurants, have a coating that keeps them crisp and hot for longer. (The coating on Oasis fries is made from rice flour and modified starch.) We watched a cook tending a large deep fryer. Piled on a counter to his left were a dozen bags the size of pillows. “That’s about five minutes’ worth,” Dearie said.

Guests in Opus consume roughly six hundred pounds of fries in an evening, Dearie said, and fry consumption rises with the number of Americans on board and the number of children—as does pizza consumption. The night before, in the ship’s “New York-style” pizza restaurant, demand had been so high that Dearie had to redeploy cooks from elsewhere on the ship. Passengers on very short cruises eat significantly more of everything, he said, because they feel time pressure to experience as much as they can, and the ship has to be provisioned accordingly. All Royal Caribbean’s purchasing is handled by the company’s logistics office, in Weston, Florida, which makes adjustments based on cruise routes, passenger origins, and a variety of demographic factors. Nearly all the food on Royal Caribbean cruises, including items imported from other countries, is purchased from American distributors. Even ships based in foreign countries are provisioned from the United States, with air-cargo containers flown to their home ports.

Cruises that originate in Europe or Asia have different gastronomic profiles from ones that operate out of Fort Lauderdale, Dearie said. “The Spanish eat a lot more fruit, a lot more bread, a lot more cheeses,” he explained. “Brits like heavy foods, cold-weather foods.” Fruit consumption rises with air temperature. New Yorkers and people travelling without children are more likely to patronize the restaurants that require a surcharge. Australians drink the most. Americans like chewy cookies, but Europeans want crunchy, dunkable ones. Chinese travellers snack little, prefer set dining times, and usually want to sit with the other members of their tour group. They also drink less than people from most other countries, but shop and gamble more, and are highly unlikely to go dancing after dinner. On Asian cruises with large numbers of Chinese passengers, at least one of the ship’s night clubs will typically be converted into a high-stakes gaming room, to handle overflow from the casino.

The first true cruise is sometimes said to have been the lengthy international tour that Mark Twain describes in “The Innocents Abroad.” That trip began and ended at a wharf in Manhattan in 1867, and included stops in Gibraltar, Marseilles, Genoa, Constantinople, Odessa, Beirut, Alexandria, Cádiz, and Bermuda, as well as side trips by train, donkey, and horse. Twain’s vessel, a refitted Civil War side-wheeler called the Quaker City, took more than five months to circle back to New York. Onboard activities included smoking, card-playing, suffering from seasickness, and playing “horse billiards,” a shuffleboard-like deck game. Seagoing mechanical-refrigeration technology was still at least fifteen years off, although the relatively short duration of the Atlantic crossing would have made it possible for the Quaker City’s passengers to eat fresh meat and produce all the way to Europe. Even so, Twain scarcely mentions food, at sea or on land—although he does write that, at one point, he complained to the captain about the steadily declining quality of the ship’s coffee, only to be told that what he’d been drinking was tea.

“The presentation is dreadful.”

During the summer of 1949, my mother, between her junior and senior years at Vassar, spent seven weeks touring Europe with a group that consisted mainly of other college students. They travelled there and back on the Queen Mary, six days each way. In her diary, she described the ship as “a combination of the Rockefeller Center and the Biltmore,” and on the fourth day out of New York she wrote, “I’ve never known such a life of ease.” It was the last golden age of the ocean liner, between the end of the Second World War and the emergence of the jet set. She and her friends played bridge and charades, danced the hokey pokey to Ken Grieff’s Band, and sang on deck with members of a Scottish football team. She was initially more impressed with the food service than with the food, which she described on her second day at sea as “pretty good” but “not extraordinary.” By the end of the week, she’d come around. She wrote that dinner the night before they arrived in England was “simply wonderful”: “I had juice, soup, fish, roast beef and turkey!” And because she saved the menu I know what she passed over: creamed mushrooms on toast, timbale of ham with sauce madère, and farm sausage and tomato (which was grilled to order and took an extra ten minutes). For dessert there was “pouding sans souci,” raspberry coupe, fresh fruit, and three different ices: pineapple, vanilla, and Neapolitan. During the voyage home, she and her friends explored first class—“fabulous shops, lounges, wide staircases, people in evening dress”—and saw Jack Benny and Hedy Lamarr.

The democratization of long-distance travel in recent decades has had varying impacts on dining in transit. The food in coach class on airplanes has grown steadily worse, at least partly because the average traveller tends to book flights based solely on the cost of the ticket. The food on cruise ships, though, has improved, and is now so important to most passengers that new ships are often designed around eating opportunities. Big ships also have economic advantages over airlines: they have large populations of captive diners, and the cruise lines do their purchasing and preparation in such enormous quantities that their costs per meal are extremely low, even for fancy items. If you book an interior cabin, stay away from the casino, and stick with the complimentary meals, a cruise can be a very inexpensive vacation. And even if you treat yourself to meals with surcharges you’re unlikely to run up the sort of tab you easily could on land.

One evening on Oasis, I joined a dozen other passengers at the ship’s Chef’s Table, in a private dining room on Deck 12. (The surcharge was seventy-five dollars.) All my fellow-diners were Royal Caribbean veterans; one couple had taken half a dozen cruises on Oasis or Allure alone, and had eaten a meal at the Chef’s Table on every cruise. We were served champagne in the ship’s library, then taken upstairs for a three-hour, five-course meal accompanied by five matched wines. Each new offering was introduced by either our chef for the evening (Nielish Kanvinde, from India) or our sommelier (Mladen Mitic, from Romania). Both spoke rapidly and with intense enthusiasm. Our first course was constructed from lobster medallions, cauliflower panna cotta, paddlefish caviar, micro-lettuce leaves, shaved beetroot, and Parmesan tuiles, all floating or semi-submerged in a cucumber-basil Martini and served in a Martini glass. (Kanvinde made a modified version, with boneless chicken breast, for a guest from Arkansas who had a shellfish allergy.) That course was followed by three soups served in small teacups, and Kanvinde explained that a key to preparing one of them—a “lemon-scented pea soup with Alaskan crab-leg meat”—was to grate just the very outermost layer of the lemon peel for the zest that provided the first note in its aroma.

When the meal was over, Kanvinde gave each of us an illustrated cookbook, containing recipes from nine of Royal Caribbean’s onboard restaurants. “Back at home you can try my secrets and you can all become good chefs,” he said. I gave my copy to my wife, who has written cookbooks of her own. A couple of nights later, for dinner, she made a dish from the ship’s main dining room: pan-fried cauliflower cakes topped by asparagus spears, julienned tomatoes, and sliced red bell peppers—the last three ingredients sautéed in garlic confit—and garnished with parsley sprigs and blade-thin fried onion rings. Potato pancakes are one of my favorite things, ever, but Royal Caribbean’s cauliflower cakes are better. They’re crisp and light, and not even slightly mealy, and if I’d tasted them blind I would have used up most of my twenty guesses before hitting on their main ingredient.

One of the challenges in marketing cruises is that more than a few people associate them with vomiting and diarrhea. There have been several highly publicized outbreaks, including two early this year on Royal Caribbean ships. In January, more than six hundred people on Explorer of the Seas got sick, and the cruise had to be shortened by two days. The culprit is almost always Norwalk virus, also known as norovirus. It’s responsible for at least half of gastroenteritis outbreaks worldwide, and it’s usually spread through direct or indirect contact with infected people, often through traces of their feces. Ships are vulnerable because they place large numbers of people in close contact for extended periods. The same is true of other institutions where norovirus outbreaks are common—casinos, hotels, dormitories, military barracks, prisons, schools, restaurants, nursing homes, and hospitals. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has estimated that roughly twenty million Americans suffer a norovirus infection each year; the vast majority recover in three days or less, but the virus is occasionally lethal. According to the C.D.C., noroviruses are associated with cruise ships partly because cruise ships are monitored by health authorities, so that outbreaks on board are more likely to be identified and reported. Cruises also typically last long enough for the causal chain to be obvious; people who pick up noroviruses in airplane lavatories seldom associate the resulting illness with their flight.

In my stateroom, I watched two informational videos on the ship’s closed-circuit TV channel, one about norovirus and one about cleaning hands—which the C.D.C. describes as a “ ‘do-it-yourself’ vaccine” for norovirus and other ailments. I also saw hand-washing notices throughout the ship, including on the walls along I-95 and on a video monitor above the ship’s ice rink. (Royal Caribbean employs more than two hundred professional skaters.) At all hours, I saw crew members wiping down handrails and other touchable surfaces, and there were Purell dispensers everywhere. Most alcohol-based hand cleansers are only minimally effective against norovirus, but a few years ago the company that makes Purell introduced an extra-powerful version, called VF481, especially for cruise ships, casinos, hospitals, and other high-risk environments.

Jim Mann, who is a chemist and the executive director of the Handwashing for Life Institute, an educational organization, told me, “Cruise liners do absolutely amazing things to get clean hands and eliminate the bugs. A cruise ship is the one place where, if you’re working in a galley and you’re caught a second time not washing your hands, they put you off the ship.” Even when employees are rigorous, one or two passengers who are sick when they board can infect others. Jaret Ames, who is the chief of the C.D.C.’s Vessel Sanitation Program, told me in an e-mail, “Though it seems that media coverage of cruise-ships outbreaks has increased recently, norovirus activity has remained consistent with a seasonal pattern of increased activity during the winter months.” On most ships, hygiene protocols are quickly ramped up if onboard infirmaries notice more than the odd gastrointestinal complaint.

Keith Brown, like other Oasis employees, wears a nametag that identifies his country of origin, in his case Trinidad and Tobago. When he was in high school, he told me, he wanted to be a biochemist, and he took courses in biology, chemistry, and physics. But he couldn’t afford university tuition, so, to earn some money in a hurry, he signed on as a stockkeeper on a cruise ship. “Then I fell in love with the job, and here I am, twenty years later,” he said. His current title is inventory manager. He is responsible for keeping Oasis supplied with food and beverages, and also with linens, towels, toiletries, and everything else required for its “hotel-related” functions. I met him one afternoon, and he gave me a tour.

Oasis has twenty-one temperature-controlled storage rooms, each dedicated to a different food or beverage type. Poultry, seafood, and meat are stored in three separate freezer rooms, to reduce the possibility of cross-contamination; fish for sushi is kept apart from other fish; coffee for the ship’s Starbucks shop is stacked separately from other coffee, in compliance with Royal Caribbean’s contract with Starbucks. Some of the storage rooms are almost large enough to get lost in; signs on their doors warn employees to visit them in pairs and to make sure, before sealing them up again, that no one has been left inside. Brown led me into a vast produce room and lifted a head of broccoli from its box. “This is a flower, so you will have changes taking place,” he said. “It will come in extremely green—looking nice, like this—but it won’t stay that way.” Oasis was scheduled, after our return to Florida, to make a very long trip, a fourteen-day ocean crossing to Barcelona, and then to make a series of five-day cruises in Europe. (After that, it was scheduled to go to Rotterdam for extended routine maintenance, during which all the carpeting and other soft surfaces would be replaced, several galleys and restaurants would be reconfigured, and the current Broadway show, “Hairspray,” would be swapped out for a new one, “Cats.”) For the Atlantic crossing, Brown told me, he would be taking on six thousand pounds of broccoli, and hoping that enough of it would last all the way to Spain. “Broccoli’s a vital part of the operation,” he said. “It’s a center-of-the-plate item on every dish in the dining room.” He stocks a small frozen supply, as a backup, he said, but his goal is never to use it. Other delicate produce types are spinach, mushrooms, bananas, and specialty items like micro-arugula; the hardiest are pineapples, watermelons, eggplants, and peppers. Every day, Brown and the ship’s executive chef visit all the food-storage rooms. If they notice, say, that many of the bananas have unexpectedly advanced from Stage 3 to Stage 5, the chef will add banana bread, banana pudding, or banana soup to various menus.

Most of the storage rooms we visited were nearly empty, because our cruise was almost over, but the ones containing beer, wine, and liquor were full. Brown said that he had taken on all the beverages for the Atlantic crossing when he loaded the ship for our trip, so that he and his crew would have more time to deal with the other provisions when we returned. Beer, white wine, and soft drinks are kept in a chilled storage room; red wine and liquor are housed separately, at room temperature. “Our quickest-moving beer is Corona,” he said. “Right now, we have seventeen thousand bottles. Bud Light, twelve thousand bottles. Crystal Geyser bottled water, seventeen thousand bottles. Evian litre bottles, twenty-five thousand.” Inside the liquor room, boxes were piled high, and the walkways between the stacks were narrow. “This is our bread and butter, so we tend to stock up,” he said. Cruises are effectively subsidized by drinkers and gamblers. Royal Caribbean sells a variety of beverage packages; the most comprehensive one, called Ultimate, costs sixty-five dollars a day and entitles you to unlimited quantities of just about any liquid, from coffee and bottled water to name-brand spirits. There’s also a soft-drink-only package, which comes with an insulated cup. The cup has a radio-frequency identification chip in its base, which activates the ship’s Freestyle dispensing machines, introduced by the Coca-Cola Company a couple of years ago. The machines enable users to serve themselves more than a hundred different soft drinks and soft-drink combinations, and to add flavorings (such as orange, a favorite among passengers from the Baltics) that are otherwise unavailable in Coke products in the United States. In the soda-storage area, Brown showed me a Sprite Zero Freestyle cartridge. “It communicates directly with Coca-Cola headquarters, in Atlanta,” he said. “When it gets low, they will automatically generate a refill order for us to approve.”

On the morning we arrived back in Fort Lauderdale, I disembarked before breakfast and watched the ship being loaded for its Atlantic crossing. Terminal 18, where we had moored, was built specifically to accommodate Oasis and Allure. Semitrailers had been lined up in a staging area near the main building since before dawn, and Brown was inspecting pallets as they were unloaded. Twenty-two thousand pounds of flour, twelve thousand pounds of fresh potatoes, forty-four hundred pounds of spinach. Brown stuck a finger into a box of blueberries and made a mark on a list. He used a knife to cut through the plastic wrap on another box and reached inside. If the top part of an asparagus stalk feels wet, he had told me the day before, it’s already just about done for. Fresh mint. Huge onions. Bright white mushrooms. Radish sprouts.

A longshoreman operating a forklift pushed a pallet of celery against a pallet of sweet potatoes, then raised both at once to an opening in the ship’s hull, where a second longshoreman picked them up, one at a time, with a smaller forklift and transferred them to a member of the ship’s crew, who moved them, on a third forklift, onto a platform elevator and into a storage room. Machines turned past machines as fluidly as dancers; the drivers scarcely seemed to be watching where they were going. Items were mixed—a load of carrots, a load of strawberries, a load of sorbet—to prevent bottlenecks in the storage areas, and to keep everyone busy. I watched for about an hour, both outside and inside the ship, then said goodbye to Brown. Oasis would sail for Spain in just under seven hours, and he had thirty more trucks to unload. ♦