Will they let you eat a special diet?
Well, depending on who you are, the military doesn’t generally feed its members. If you’re deployed or in training, then yes. But when you’re at your duty station, you generally go to the grocery store (including the commissary on the installation) and get food to cook yourself, or you go to Burger King. Then again, if you’re a vegetarian, BK probably isn’t on your agenda.
I work with an officer who I know is a vegetarian. She brings her lunch to work most days, and if we’re all going out to lunch as a group, she’ll get something appropriate.
The short answer is that military personnel generally eat whatever they want.
It’s certainly true that the Army supplies kosher/halal rations for soldiers
with religious dietary requirements. This site appears to give more than you ever
wanted to know about rations:
http://www.dscp.dla.mil/subs/rations/rations.htm
I’ve not eaten Meals Ready to Eat, but I’ve eaten British army field rations
for weeks at a time; we have four different vegetarian menus as opposed to
about 8 meat menus. They’re not noticeably better or worse than the carnivores’ rations. I don’t think that they’d be suitable for vegans, as there tends to be
cheese involved.
I am a vegetarian and I am active duty, so yes.
It’s not always easy, if thats what your asking. I keep lots of cliff bars handy.
I’d also like to point out that we have a vegetarian food pyramid hanging up in the galley.
A little nit-pick here. I was in the U.S. Navy for 20 years and every duty station I worked on or visited, sea or shore, served at least 3 meals a day. Maybe more depending on the working hours.
Most every meal had several choices of vegatables, starches and other non-meat items. Some may have been prepared using meat or dairy however.
US Military MREs do have vegetarian menus as well. They taste just as crappy as the meat ones, but they usually come with Charms instead of M&Ms or Skittles, so that pisses me off.
M&Ms, so far as I know, contain no animal products other than milk. IIRC (the Mars site was no help with ingredients) Skittles contain either gelatin (derived from animal bone), or confectioners glaze (All the sites I’ve seen define this as a ‘secretion of the lac insect’. I’ve been unable to find a clearer definition. Is it lac vomit? Lac urine? Lac sweat?). They are not a vegetarian product.
Not in the armed forces, but my sister is a cadet at the Air Force Academy. She sayeth that she knows a couple vegetarians, and, at the Academy - like any college where they cook for 4000+ people - it’s possible to eat vegetarian, and all the food sucks, across the board.
She did say, however, that during basic training, everyone generally ate whatever the hell they could, whenever they could. I recall that on their ‘midway through basic at-ease for a day picnic’, she (a notoriously picky eater) called home raving about how wonderful the ribs they’d had were, and she’d never once liked ribs before. So my bet is it’s possible, but it might get sort of hairy during some of the training.
My brother, who just finished Air Force tech school, says it’d be near impossible to do during basic – and you get so hungry there that you’ll eat anything. After that, it’s doable. I’m assuming if somebody had religious reasons for being a vegetarian they’d make arrangements so that they could even in basic, but otherwise, I’m not sure it’d be worth the 27 hoops you’d have to jump through.
It’s “shellac”. You know, the finishing material. Here’s a good description.
Are MRE’s really that bad?
I’ve had some before, and I thought some were pretty tastey.
I read through that whole cite about MREs and such, and now I want to know… Would the U.S. military accommodate a vegan – no animal products at all? (I’m talking food-wise, because I assume boots and other gear are leather, which probablywouldn’t be ok with a vegan lifestyle.) So, no milk, honey, cheese, etc.
Even during basic training, aren’t there options for recruits who are prohibited from eating certain foods for religious reasons?
MissGypsy
The military won’t ‘accomodate’ any special diet, really. If your on a ship underway, you eat two servings off the salad bar instead of one, or you ask for extra carrots and you take a big spoonfull out of the jar of peanut butter in your rack. If your in the field, you either give away your meat or you make sure you get only vegetarian MRE’s. When you are stationed on a base you can go to personnel and ask that you get your food allowance in cash and lose your right to the galley for free on the basis that your a vegetarian.
Basically, if your a vegan and your deployed, your going to be eating animal products. But you have to be sort of pragmatic about it…you did sign up for this after all.
It’s possible, but unlikely. The eating part of Basic is kinda hazy right now (and I was a chow runner!), but I seem to recall that you at least could choose from what was being served. And not all of it contained meat.
The chow hall here has a decent salad bar, but eating salad all the time can get old. It’d be harder if you live in the dorms, because most of your BAS (Basic Allowance for Subsistence) goes to the chow hall before it hits your bank account.
Vegetarian MREs tend to be better than your regular MREs, for some odd reason. I’ve heard MREs described as “a bowel plug in a bag”. They certainly are. One a day keeps the movements away.
The ones I’ve had were not bad. IIRC (years ago) the main corse was almost like you would have in a can of chunky soup, but more ‘stuff’ and less liquid (and cold). 
I think the presentation and the coloring have a lot to do with the general dislike of them.
These days they come with chemical heater things, so at least it’s not cold. When I was a kid my dad would occasionally bring one home (no heaters, those are more recent) and we’d sample it just for the heck of it. The food ranged from adequate to fairly awful, but I’m also sure MREs are better than what they replaced.
I also bet it’s different in different services. I guess if you’re a hard-core vegetarian you want to look into how you can eat in them if you’ve decided to join but haven’t decided where exactly TO join.
Nothing substantial to add, other than my parents still have a Chicken al a King MRE in their kitchen cabinet. My dad retired from the Army in 1989. And I don’t think he was anywhere requiring a MRE since closer to his tours in Veitnam. 
We ate them as novelties when we were kids (along with the freeze dried ice cream from Cape Canaveral), but I don’t remember exactly how awful they were.
Unless things have changed since my day (got out in '96), single soldiers didn’t receive BAS (food money) – you were expected to eat in the dining facility (excellent breakfast, mediocre everything else, “free” of charge) or use your own cash if you wanted something else. Of course married soldiers received BAS and BAQ (rent money), and had to pay if they ate in the dining facilities (although forging meal cards were so easy, they rarely paid).
We had a vegetarian in my unit. Single gal. Because of this, she was approved for an “exception to policy” and was given BAS.
In my unit in Germany, we were ALL given BAS due to the nature of the job – air traffic controllers and support – can’t really go to the dining facility during their limited hours.
Most MRE’s were always pretty good. I think that despite what was said above, water-activated heaters were always available; they just weren’t always bought by the unit (yeah, you buy 'em and they come out of your unit’s budget, just like MRE’s). Of course in the field twice a year, we lost our BAS for those couple of weeks (even married soldiers), since MRE’s were provided.
I thinki MRE’s get a bad reputation just because you have to have something to complain about. They do block the flow a little bit, and I don’t know if it’s intentional or not, but we’ve always “heard” that it was by design. Additionally a single MRE is supposed to have nutrition and calories to sustain you for an entire day. On most field excercises, we’d get three MRE’s per day, so maybe that would contribute to the constipation. If we were doing flight following or otherwise near a bigger unit, we’d often get three hot meals per day, if they brought their cooks.
Oh, and I really, really miss the MRE oatmeal bars. Yum!
rofl…
I am in the SCA, and our ‘household’ is known for its culinary expertise. We have a ceremonial MRE in our kitchen goods at the Pennsic War [essentially our ‘national convention’ held near Pittsburg every august.] it is a threat…if you whine about any facet of the food, you can just go eat an MRE…we pride ourselves on our food for very good reason, we have a fully functional kitchen and cook for anywhere from 12 to 65 people each meal and several of us were at one point in time in our pasts professional chefs=)
I think the dehydrated pork patty, and the chicken ala king MREs are the worst of them. I love the dehydrated fruit=) justlike crunchberries=)