The Weekend Intelligence: Mise en masse
The Intelligence from The Economist
The Economist
4.6 • 3.6K Ratings
🗓️ 28 November 2025
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Chef Gary Thomas has a lot on his plate. That’s because he’s in the business of feeding thousands of people a day on a ship in the middle of the ocean. Not just any ship – the Star of the Seas, the largest cruise ship in the world.
The Weekend Intelligence’s senior producer Barclay Bram braved a trip to the Bahamas to try to figure out the secret behind one of the most impressive food operations in the world.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Economist. |
| 0:07.1 | I went on a cruise once, as a kid, a short one, a supposedly fun thing I'll never do again. |
| 0:14.5 | I had no idea what I was in for. |
| 0:17.1 | Going to restaurants was kind of a rare thing for us. |
| 0:20.2 | Then, suddenly, two meal seatings a day, |
| 0:23.0 | all cloth napkins and fawning service, plus buffets seemingly all day long. Oh, and at midnight. |
| 0:30.7 | 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 |
| 0:39.3 | store it all? Weren't there insane |
| 0:41.3 | amounts of leftovers? How did they |
| 0:43.4 | have time to make the food and the Santa |
| 0:45.4 | watermelon carvings and the elven ice |
| 0:47.3 | sculptures that would melt before lunch? |
| 0:50.1 | And could I really |
| 0:51.4 | maybe just keep eating |
| 0:53.3 | bacon indefinitely? |
| 0:59.2 | I'm Jason Palmer, and this is the weekend intelligence. |
| 1:03.4 | These are the kinds of questions that occupied my colleague Barclay Bram. |
| 1:07.6 | Well, maybe not the infinite bacon one. |
| 1:09.9 | The eating is a centerpiece of cruising. Sure, |
| 1:13.2 | there's the bingo and the promenade deck and karaoke night at lounge singers and who's up for |
| 1:17.7 | shuffleboard tomorrow. But all day, every day, and a lot of the night for many people, |
| 1:23.6 | me too, if God help me, I ever end up on one again. A cruise ship hosts just one long eating contest. |
... |
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