I have been writing these essays for the last 16 years. It all started with an injury to my brain which impaired my speech as a result of a stroke in 1997. I started writing these essays and somehow after 764 such essays, I have still continued. As a matter of fact, I seem at this late date in my life to enjoy writing essays.
As a general, almost exclusive rule, the subjects have been selected by myself. Rarely, the readers of these essays made suggestions or requests for an essay on a specific subject. One such request was from my old friend Harry Livermore who asked for an essay about his recently departed wife and the nature of our relationship over many years. Now the owner and operator of the website Ezra’s Essays has made another request.
In the beginning, there was no title to these essays. For example, my next-door neighbor Irving Licht, referred to them as “Ed’s Stuff.” At this point, for the past three years or thereabouts, the material that has appeared in 764 essays is called “Ezra’s Essays.”
The term that my grandson, the owner and operator of Ezra’s Essays, used when making his request was the term “grub.” I was unaware that my grandson was acquainted with the term grub. But he is a worldly fellow. For example, in Ireland and England, bars are called pubs. From that term, we have the food served there which is called “pub grub” So Kevin is in good company in asking for an essay on grub. Following are some anecdotes that apply to grub, primarily dealing with my association with grub served by the United States Army.
Now, before we get started, you should be aware that at the time I served my enlistment in 1942 through the end of 1945, the Army had a school called the Cook and Baker School. It really made no difference what a recruit’s civilian occupation might have been. When the Army needed someone to be a cook or a baker, it would issue a requisition to the rest of the United States Army. Whether the recruits liked it or not, there would soon be a new class of cooks and bakers. The result was that there was a great sameness and dullness to the cooking done in the United States Army.
The Army specialized in dullness and as a result, the food or grub that appeared on Army menus was distinguished by its sameness and its dullness.
The Army did not use much local produce. It relied heavily on products that could be used in the event of war. For example, there were no fresh potatoes, but rather, the Army relied upon such stuff as potato flakes, which tasted almost nothing like a real potato should have tasted. In the end, as I said, there was a great sameness to the Army cooking. No one strayed from the recipes provided by the Cook and Baker’s School. As a result, a meal served in France or Italy would taste very much like a meal served in Louisiana or on Iwo Jima.
I entered the Army at age 19. I was accustomed to the cooking of my mother. She learned to cook using a wood fired stove in the rural setting of Golconda, Illinois. Her two main dishes were navy bean soup and the baking of bread. So I was not a gourmet when I entered the Army. Also I was not a gourmet when the Army finally released me in 1945.
When I entered the Army, it was at Jefferson Barracks, the southern-most tip of the city of St. Louis. Jefferson Barracks was the first post established west of the Mississippi in the 18th century. The cooking at Jefferson Barracks was a good deal better than I had thought it to be. But it was a lot better than the cooking of my mother, which is not saying much. But the whole episode at Jefferson Barracks only lasted about ten days. I was then designated to go to Las Vegas, New Mexico for my basic training.
Las Vegas, New Mexico is a training field, during which we marched from one end to the other with dust all around us. The food there was absolutely terrible. I suppose I should say that the grub there was absolutely terrible. Several nights of the week we were fed sliced sausage which, if you will pardon the expression, looked a lot like a horse’s penis. Soon the GIs named the dish we were served as “horse cock.”
Eventually the officer in charge of providing the enlisted men’s food in Las Vegas, New Mexico, was court-martialed because he was cheating on what he had actually spent for food. I might say that the horse cock was untasty and should not have been served to anyone. But the United States Army does things in its own way.
Soon I was transferred to a training base in Coral Gables, Florida where the meals were again standard Army fare. It seemed to me that standard Army fare consisted of spoonable dishes which could be ladled out to the soldiers passing in line during the meal period. This was in Coral Gables, Florida. There was not much difference between the meals we were served in Coral Gables and the meals that were served elsewhere in the Army. The Army made certain that no one would brag about the cooking of an Army meal. Before long, I found myself on a troop ship from Charleston, South Carolina, to Dakar, the capital of Senegal. The food on the troop ship was more than abominable. It was atrocious. For one thing, they had more troops on this unescorted vessel than should have been permitted. But battles were raging in North Africa and it was important that we appeared on the Allied side of the battlefield.
During the war I was involved in the North African campaign. But the grub was pretty much identical to the grub served throughout the United States Army. The point that I am making is that with the influence of the Cook and Baker School and the drafting of the people to attend those schools along with reliance on such things as fake potato flakes, there was no individuality. I am certain that there were local foodstuffs that could be used to spice up the food. That was never ever done. I do not know this for a fact but I suspect that meals fed to soldiers such as myself were probably planned in Washington. There was as I say no individuality in the preparation of Army food.
The same was true generally of the Italian campaign. The Italians are great innovators of food but none of that ever appeared on an Army base. We simply stuck to the Cook and Baker School and the menus that were prepared there.
Speaking of spoonable dishes, if someone serving in the food line became angered or even as a joke, he would seem to take some delight in plopping a load of the main meal in an inopportune place on the mess kits that were being offered to him by the soldiers. I remember that the Army loved to serve canned sliced peaches. On many occasions, the man behind the serving counter would miss and the offering of food, such as it was, would end up among the peaches.
Anyone who claimed that he could identify the ingredients of the food must have been a master salesman. There were no such things as cakes. There was no such thing as a fresh vegetable. When someone would ask a soldier coming out of a mess hall what he had had to eat, he would probably say something about, “It was another case of mystery meat.” In fact, the people who controlled what we were fed may have been in the United States in Washington and we were in Italy or elsewhere. That made no difference. We were fed the same old menus and the men who were behind the counters in the mess halls still loved to put the day’s main dish into the peaches.
When I left combat, I reported to my original assignment, which was in Accra, the Gold Coast. That country is now called Ghana. Again there was a prohibition, apparently, on using local produce including eggs. There was an occasion when, on my one day off from the flight line, I took an Army bus toward downtown Accra. On that occasion, I saw the equivalent of a YMCA. I had heard that they had real eggs. So I got off the bus and offered myself to the administrations of the noble YMCA. Miraculously, there appeared eggs by the carload. We on the base, say five miles outside of Accra, were eggless. But here was the YMCA offering eggs of any sort. They could be fried, scrambled, or poached or whatever. But the United States Army had none of it. On my days off, I would usually find the time to take a United States Army bus to downtown Accra and have a meal of eggs. The Army forbade us to eat any of the meat because of sanitary conditions. We were pretty much confined to eggs. But as a vegetarian, I have no objection to that prohibition whatsoever.
On more than one occasion, I passed through the town of Dakar, Senegal. They had wonderful lobsters in Dakar. None of them ever appeared on an Army menu. I suppose that they simply relied on what they were taught at the Cook and Baker School with the directives coming from Washington. The point here is that there was dullness and sameness to the food served in the Army mess halls throughout the world.
Now however we turn to a brighter side of the grub served in the United States Army. The war ended for me on August 16 when a battered old Japanese major domo climbed the rigging on the Battleship Missouri and signed a peace treaty with the United States.
By this time I was in Greenwood, Mississippi. The idea at that point was to train for an assault on the Japanese home islands. We were supposed to get a new airplane called the A-26, which was bigger than the A-20s that we had flown all over Europe. There were no A-26s anywhere, so there was nothing to practice. But that did not stop the United States Army from making an investment in food in an effort to keep all of the soldiers from being released. Miraculously there were eggs which were offered in any fashion desired: scrambled, poached, etc. And in an effort to keep the soldiers happy, there were steaks at every turn. The Army had concluded that if these soldiers were well fed, they might re-enlist at a greater rate. For myself, the idea was to get out of the United States Army and leave those memories behind me. I attempted to leave on about September 1 and I did not secure my release from the United States Army until November 8, 1945. The period in Greenwood was marked by steaks and eggs. Those people in the government who controlled the menus were going nuts.
Well, that is the story that my grandson Kevin had requested. Both locally and abroad, the cooks and bakers and other personnel in the mess halls were all trained at the Cook and Baker School run by the United States Army. Individuality among cooks and bakers was a forbidden subject I suspect.
Now let’s talk about how this food was presented to the soldier.
There is a distinction between how Army grub was served in this country and how Army grub was served to the soldiers abroad. In the case of the domestic grub, trays were usually provided which I assume dishwashers, using a dishwashing machine, took over after the grub was consumed. But overseas, it was served in the GI’s mess kit. Grub served abroad, once it had been consumed, or even ignored, became the responsibility of the individual soldier or GI to deal with. In most cases, there were three large containers of boiling water as the mess hall was entered. Sometimes the Army used barrels as containers. The barrels had previously held engine oil but had been properly scrubbed before being used for water. Following the meal, the soldier would take his mess kit and try to knock off all of the remaining particles of food into a garbage can. Once this had been achieved, the GI would then approach the boiling container of water and plunge his mess kit together with the knife, fork, spoon and cup into the boiling water. Once this had been accomplished he would move on and plunge his mess kit into the second large container of boiling water. Finally, there came the rinse cycle in which the GI would plunge his mess kit and accessories into the boiling water again. This was followed by the GI waving his arms about him as he attempted to dry off the mess kit.
This was an elementary system of washing mess kits. It led to several cases of dysentery. You may be interested to know that the word dysentery was never used by American soldiers. They always referred to dysentery as a case of “GI shits.” I suppose that this had to do with the severity and longevity of the dysentery. How this term came about is beyond me. But it was always a matter of the plural form of the GI shits.
You may be interested to observe what a mess kit looked like in the era of World War II. When the mess kit was opened up, one section was reserved for the main course and perhaps some fake vegetables. The top of the mess kit served as a means of conveying some sort of dessert, usually canned sliced peaches. I expect that the right side of the mess kit also served to provide a place for bread if there was any.

Well now we have covered the entire assembly of the serving of the dull and unappetizing food through the washing of the mess kits which often resulted in dysentery. At this point, I must quit dictating this essay because it has made my thoughts of eating much less enjoyable.
Incidentally, the use of the word “grub” for food has survived since the 1650s, almost four centuries, so it appears that grub will be us, perhaps permanently.
In any event, when we were finally released from the Army, I returned home from Greenwood, Mississippi, intent upon resuming the life that had been interrupted three and a half years earlier. Well, that is my story about the grub that we were served during the period of my enlistment in 1942 – 1945. It is not an exotic or inspiring story. Perhaps the highlights were the court martial of the officer who was knocking down on the enlisted men’s mess funds at Las Vegas, New Mexico. But if anyone thought of joining the Army in hope of fine dining, that hope was absolutely destroyed.
So it is that this is my story on behalf of Kevin Shepherd, the subject of dining or, as Kevin puts it, grub in the Army. I realize that it has not been an exciting essay. Given the material that I had to work with, the grub in the American Army, you can understand the difficulties that I had to endure. I hope that this conveys my thoughts about the sameness and dullness of the food in the Army. I suspect that there is not a whole lot of difference with what is happening today. Incidentally, the Cook and Baker School is a thing of the past because the Army now has local people to feed the troops. It is a move that should have been taken several years ago. So with that thought in mind, we bid farewell to Army grub. It is not very inspiring. But Army grub was not inspiring either.
E. E. CARR
September 10, 2013
Essay 765
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Kevin’s commentary: Well I suppose I now have another reason to never enlist, not that I needed one. I thought this essay was one of the funniest in a while, honestly, and I had a great time reading it. It seems like Pop may have had a little bit to get off his chest when it came to Army food, which an assumption I feel that I am safe to make considering the heft of this essay. Hopefully writing this could be at least a little cathartic for him.
Seriously though, I was floored by some of the information in this one. No eggs? No potatoes? When I think of food that doesn’t spoil and can be transported anywhere, potatoes are probably food #1 on that list if we don’t count manufactured goods. Eggs are a close second because they last a heck of a long time and as far as I know, there’s not a country in the world that lacks chickens at this point.
I believe that a few years ago Pop gave me a gift of one of his old MREs, or “meals ready to eat.” It came in a tight, vacuum-sealed, tan plastic bag. I think it contained jambalaya. It looked like this:

The jury is out when it comes to whether or not a MRE was better than horse cock, but hopefully it would be at least a little preferable. My final Army-grub question is this: when were MREs served vs mess hall food? For missions that would last multiple days, maybe?
Aside from that, I can happily say that I now know all I need to about food in the Army.