For whatever reason, the phrase “the better the army, the worse the food” occurred to me this morning. I think I might have read it in an Astérix book decades ago. I wondered if there was any truth to it. I thought not much.
Then I thought about the “spaghetti run” from Band of Brothers. Since spaghetti is cheap and popular, I was surprised it would not be served regularly.
Food is important for morale, any soldier understands that, and wealthy countries have higher expectations and can theoretically spend more. But I’ve heard that Americans were jealous of French getting wine and cheese rations, Italians getting “breakfast alcohol”, and Canadians being served beaver tails, fish-n-brewis, fiddleheads, dulce and bannock with salmon. (Maybe my first musing is true…)
When I think of American rations, not being a military guy, I think of how it makes the news when they build a Burger King or Pizza Hut on some distant base.
So take this where you want. Educate me. Say what the food was like if you served. The good. The bad. The fugly. How it could be improved. Who had it the best or worst (outside of desperate situations). Thanks.
In officer candidate school (OCS – equivalent of basic training) the foot was quite good and hearty, and we could eat as much as we wanted (which was a lot, because we were probably burning 5000+ calories per day).
On the submarine, it depended on the cook (except for breakfast, which I thought was so terrible I never ate it – probably because we rarely had fresh eggs and thus had to rely on dehydrated eggs). There were a handful of cooks on the crew, and they rotated so, in general, a different cook was on duty for each meal. The good cooks could make good meals even out of the frozen and canned remnants deep into an at-sea deployment between replenishments. The bad cooks couldn’t make good meals even out of the fresh, high quality meat, seafood, and veggies that we had for a week or so after a replenishment.
I haven’t seen Band of Brothers (I will someday), but I read Bill Mauldn’s memoir The Brass Ring about his WWII service. He was in Italy for quite a while, and he talked about eating spaghetti there. It wasn’t served by the army, but it was his (a lot of Americans) first exposure to it. I think the army stuck to what was very familiar to most Americans of the time.
I don’t know about mess hall chow but there’s a trope, how true or false I don’t know, that field rations are deliberately made unappetizing so that troops won’t eat them out of boredom and then be caught short.
In Gustav Hasford’s book The Short Timers, which was the basis for Full Metal Jacket, he described Marines disguising themselves as Army personnel so they could sneak into their mess hall. Apparently the Marine food in Vietnam wasn’t too good.
My uncle was stationed in Germany in the Army during the Vietnam war. He says that he always enjoyed being sent on errands to the Air Force side of the base, because that meant that he could eat there, and the Air Force food was always much better than the Army. Both were supplied with the exact same ingredients, but the Air Force took care to use those ingredients to make something actually good. At least some of the Army chefs, meanwhile, would deliberately ruin the food, for some petty reason of their own.
Spaghetti is popular now. Band of Brothers was WWII, right? In the 1940s, Italian was an exotic and adventurous foreign cuisine.
I served in the Air Force a decade ago, and the food was pretty good. And it’s true that I’ve heard troops from other branches praise our food as well.
In Basic Training it isn’t the tastiest food sometimes since they try to make everything as healthy as possible, and you don’t really have much time to enjoy it anyway since you have to eat as fast as you can. But once you get to Tech School and onward, the food in the DFAC is actually really good.
There are situations where you might have to eat MRE’s, like we did occasionally in Basic during BEAST Week and during readiness exercises later on, but they aren’t that bad. Some like the chili mac are actually good. You just have to figure out which are the best ones, although in Basic those often became the ones with the best snacks, since we were denied sugar elsewhere. I was given a Diet Pepsi after a long day of KP duty once and it was one of the greatest things I had ever tasted since we couldn’t have any sugar or caffeine.
Which doesn’t really make sense to me. I’d expect the cooks would be eating the same thing they’re serving, so deliberately making a bad meal would be bad for them as well. Also, were they kept isolated from the other soldiers, thus immune to reprisals from their peers?
You are certainly correct about spaghetti not being popular among non-Italians in the 1940s. Thanks for that. I’m pretty sure my grandfather died without ever having eaten pasta. (His loss, natch.)
YouTuber EmmyMade has done the same thing, although in her case, she eats modern MREs.
The book “Burma Surgeon” by Dr. Gordon Seagrave is long out of print but not hard to find. He tells one story about their base getting an air drop of supplies, and when one crate breaks open to reveal its contents, several GI’s vomited upon seeing it, because they really were that tired of eating SPAM.
The “Townsends” channel does that regularly - making vintage recipes with vintage equipment. They DO use modern ingredients like wheat flour, eggs, milk, and nutmeg. Lots of nutmeg.
When I was in Navy ROTC in high school I got to go on a week-long “mini boot camp” at Camp Pendleton, which IIRC is where most Marines go after graduating from MCRD. We wore BDUs and slept in Quonset huts and took 60-second showers in the morning and spent most of our days doing drill and academics and (simulated) rifle & pistol training, capped off with a free-for-all scramble up a fairly steep and EXTREMELY muddy hill called “The First Sergeant”, and we got to eat in the same cafeteria the Marines did.
I recall the food being pretty dang good, though the portions were a little small. I specifically remember a pretty decent chili mac and fried fish filets. There was also a soda fountain and I recall one of our instructors sternly warning us not to try to be sneaky and fill our canteens with soda.
When I was in the USAF in the seventies, I recall the food as being pretty good. We had three meals a day plus “midnight chow”, which was for those working the night shifts and for those like me, where if you wanted some food after duty hours, you just had to be in uniform and have your meal card. I think the folks in the Services Squadron who operated the chow halls did a great job.
I lived in Guantanamo Bay for a year in the early 1980s. Back then there was no real milk on the base. Only powdered milk made in large quantities.
Everything we had was brought by barge and we ran out of things frequently.
Maybe it’s different now.
