A term that we have all heard many times; actually has its origins back in the early days of the Royal Navy when the ship’s company or crew was divided into smaller groups that were called a “ mess”. The mess concept was a way of feeding everyone on each watch as quickly efficiently as possible given the limited and primitive cooking facilities available at that time. The ships galley was a cramped and dark space somewhere in the bowels of the ship, usually lined with bricks, to reduce the danger of fire, and very limited in terms of what it could produce. The usual meal was something that was cooked in a pot, some sort of stew, and on rare occasions when some sort of fresh meat was available, it was roasted on a spit. Because the typical man-o-war had very little extra space, there were no space set aside for the express purpose of eating, therefore everyone other than the ships captain and his officers, which dined in the captain’s cabin, had to eat wherever they could, usually in the same space in which they slept. Each mess had a captain, whose job it was to go to the galley and fetch back for his mess mates, containers of whatever had been prepared by the cook for that meal. The mess captain would then dish out the food into each mans personal plate, which, in the Royal Navy, was a wooden low sided plate in the shape of a square, hence the phrase “Three squares a day”.