Sorry paul, but I am still at something of a loss to understand why you now consider this a safety issue? I know you alluded it as your secondary point, the primary one being that it somehow brought the whole profession into disrepute. You stated that:
Secondly, the role of the cabin crew is fundamentally safety within a team that includes the pilots.
Without doubt it is. However, I am still trying to reconcile how a captain who supposedly wanted his dinner served in stages, anyway compromised that role? There is nothing in your post that suggests it did. Neither can I see where the captains authority was either compromised or under threat?
You know, it takes all sorts.....as they say.
From what you have alleged
might have happened somewhere, the worst scenario you can arrive at, is that some captain got grumpy about something fairly trivial, and in the process
might have upset one or more of the other crewmembers.
If you are setting up a firing squad for that particular offence, you might as well use me for target practice! There has been more than one occasion in my professional life, when I have been sharper than I needed to be with someone, or a little less sensitive than perhaps I should have been. On more than one occaision I have had to apologise later, or buy a drink and make amends. It is part of the territory with being fallible and sometimes grumpy. I take some comfort in the fact that it is a reasonably rare occurrance, and not always a one way street.
So a captain somewhere might have a foible about wanting his dinner in seperate courses? I have diffficulty sharing your opinion that is somehow a serious indictment on the whole profession, moreso that it might in some way be a safety issue.
As I get older I realise that that the skill in this aspect of CRM is being able to rise to the challenges that different aspects of personality and character can sometimes present. Some people find it difficult to adapt to those changes. In my experience younger people (who often make up the larger portion of the junior crew) are, in fact much better and very good at rising to those challenges. Most, but certainly not all.
We all have faults. If somebodies only fault is that they have a requirement to eat their meal in seperate courses, I really have some difficulty with this as a "red flag" issue. How it affects safety is beyond me.