A culinary degree also covers food safety, nutrition, sanitation, menu planning, a bit of accounting (purchasing, inventory, storage), and other topics.
https://sealiftcommand.com/departments/culinary/chief-cook/2...
This isn't a four year STEM bachelors degree, but you want to make sure you have someone who isn't mixing utensils, going short on provisions, or spoiling food.
My military training included all those things. When you are feeding a war / humanitarian effort / training you have very little budget to provide a meal that hundreds will want to enjoy in a safe manner.
Don't minimize the knowledge/ effort required to do this.
The skills for being the only chef on a 24 person cutter compared to a ship with a hundred or several hundred and an entire staff (and longer deployments https://youtu.be/d2_wBfXBM1Q ) places additional demands on that skill set (or even up to the several thousand with an aircraft carrier, though that's not coast guard - https://youtu.be/w5th1yNwatQ and https://youtu.be/nBWWusUzdWk ).
It's not like the crew can decide to go to a different restaurant when out at sea.
(This also assumes that being a cook on a ship is simple, which it probably isn't.)
The ship you are on is going on a 3 month deployment with a stop in port somewhere between 4 weeks in and 6 weeks in (depending on weather). The ship has a crew of 24 people ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinel-class_cutter ).
Plan the menus, determine the provisions needed initially on ship and the additional supplies that need to be available when in port mid way through the deployment.
Make sure that the menus meet with the necessary requirements for nutrition. Two of the crew have nut allergies and one has a low sodium diet.
While the crew total is 24 people, it is possible that others will be brought on top the ship in situations where it is warranted - the provisions need to be able to account for up to an additional four people for a week.
You are the only cook and will need to be able to prepare three meals for the entire crew and have an overnight snack available. The ship runs on coffee, it should be better quality than burnt fuel oil.
The cook is essential for crew morale (consider being on a ship for 3 months and having a cook who burns all the food). Food safety is also of high importance - having any number of the crew unable to do their duties because of food poisoning is a significant impact on ship function when there's only two dozen people and little overlap.
The fundamental problem is that the Coast Guard is always chronically underfunded.
Tin cans + can opener took a few more years.
The germ theory had not been worked out at this point so he knew it worked but not the mechanism.
Which is to say I believe everyone understood that boiling made things safe or for longer. It would be almost 50 years before people heard of Pasteur’s work with fermentation (and how to stop it).
That segment starts at 16:57 (after development of the Swiss pike, changes in military tactics, mass mobilization in France, leading to the need to feed large mobile armies.)
This being Burke, it's not until 20:40 that it gets to setting up the competition and Appert.
At 24:10 is the transition to talking about tin cans. After discussing a machine to make paper, at 26:06 it leads into the chain of events that resulted in (at 27:49) that French book being translated into English, patented in England, and started (at 28:17) making preserved canned foods - because they were better at metal than bottles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steel_and_tin_cans says the idea was conceived by Philippe de Girard, who got the British merchant Peter Durand to patent the idea in 1810.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Can_opener adds "the first can openers were not patented until 1855 in England and 1858 in the United States."