A SEAFARING MEAL STARTS IN VALENCIA.

Byline: - Eric Noland

VALENCIA - ``I'm sorry, madam, we won't be able to serve you an arugula salad with crispy chickpeas because ... well, we're fresh out of lettuce.''

``May we bring you a glass of Gevrey-Chambertin Louis Latour instead, sir? For some reason, we've had an unusual run on the Chateau Talbot St Julien you ordered. I'm afraid there isn't another drop of it on the ship.''

This is the stuff of nightmare for those who serve food and drink on the Queen Mary 2. Whereas most cruise ships regularly call at ports, and can re-supply in a snap, an Atlantic crossing means five-plus days at sea, with no such opportunity.

``You don't have much choice - you have to take it all on in advance,'' said Robbie Howie, food and beverage manager on our voyage in early November. ``We plan three months in advance.''

And all of those logistics - specific quantities of produce and pasta, booze and bakery goods - are worked out in an unassuming, salmon-and- sand-colored office building in Valencia.

Cunard Line, operator of the QM2, relocated to the Santa Clarita Valley late last year in order to combine some operations with Princess Cruises, another of 12 cruise lines under the Carnival Corp. umbrella.

The mandate for Jonathan Wilson, director of culinary operations for both lines, is to peer at a computer screen and gauge the whims of passengers plying an ocean half a world away.

``We rely on a tremendous amount of historical data,'' he said. ``We're very good at guessing - if you want to call it that - at the consumption figures.''

They can vary from voyage to voyage. The Cunard brand is heavily patronized by British travelers, which means laying in plenty of English bacon and Weetabix breakfast cereal for a westbound trip. On the return, there might be less emphasis on breakfast altogether, since a time-change loss of one hour each night finds most passengers sleeping in, and breakfasting only lightly in the late morning.

Two of the biggest challenges in stocking the ship with provisions, Wilson said, are freshness of produce and meat.

``When you pick up lettuce in the market, it's already 5 or 6 days old,'' he said. ``We can get it delivered directly to the ship so it's fresher. And if we don't like what we find in Southampton, we'll fly it in from the States so it's only 2 days old. Then, on the ship we'll put it into storerooms at a certain temperature and humidity and not open that room until we need it.''

This means that salads served on the sixth evening of the voyage are not limp and brown, and fruit served at breakfast on the final morning is not soft and overripe.

Cunard also has a fresh-beef philosophy for the Queen Mary 2, so that it doesn't have to thaw out frozen hunks of meat in order to serve Cafe de Paris grilled sirloin steak on the final night. This presents its own procurement challenges.

For our trip, Howie said more than 300 tons of food were boarded in Southampton, England. That typically includes 31,000 eggs, 40,000 pounds of fresh vegetables and 1,000 gallons of ice cream.

If there is an unexpected run on one particular item, or if the raspberries all rot despite the best storage efforts, the QM2 has one other fallback option: a printing press. It's used to pump out various publications on the voyage, including menus. ``If we run out of orange roughy,'' Wilson said, ``we change the menu and reprint.''