Seems to me that if you want your soldiers to be happy and effective you have to feed them as well as you can.
FWIW in my experience in our Army here, when you were in barracks you generally got fed really well. Usually a selection of meal options and dessert, and vast quantities of it which you'd burn through with all the exercise. The only real limiting factor was time: you'd line up, load up, wolf it down and be out.
In the field there were different options. Where possible they'd get us "hot boxes", which were meals brought out hot in an insulated container - about like a really heavy duty cooler. Often this was fairly stodgy stuff, like maybe bacon and baked beans ladled out into your dixies, with bread to go with it, but it was always appreciated. Maybe an urn of tea or coffee too, or if it was hot some "goffers" - soft drinks - or tinnies (beer). There were even times when it had been cold and wet and horrible when they brought out flagons of port, which the diggers appreciated, but that wasn't part of the official ration.
Otherwise the main staple in the field was the 24-hour ration pack. There were 5 of 6 varieties, with different main and small meal tins, but the other content was more or less the same. You'd have a big tin of something like stew or luncheon meat, as smaller one, again with luncheon meat or pork & beans or something, some instant rice or instant mashed potatoo, a little tin of fruit, some hardtack ("biscuits survival" aka "biscuits inedible"), a little tin of cheese, tubes of butter and jam, tea and coffee,sugar, a cereal block, some drink base (like "Tang"), a block of chocolate, some hard lollies and a few other bits and pieces like curry or chili powder, crap wrap and elastic bands. It also came with a FRED - field ration eating device - which is a combination tin opener and spoon, and a really handy bit of gear. We'd often go through a rat pack and chuck out stuff we didn't want to carry, because you'd really struggle to eat everything in one.
We'd also sometimes get "patrol rats", which are freeze-dried and much lighter than the 24-hour rat pack. They were not bad either.
