Eating (or starving) at KAIA

I love to eat, I really do.  The smell, sight, tastes and sometimes, even feel of food makes me happy.  Grabbing the top and bottom of a soft, fresh, seeded bun and feeling the grease of a good, juicy cheeseburger...chomping down on crisp lettuce and pickle, sliding through the goo of the cheese as you bite through the burger...ahhh, heaven. 

Yeah; I don't get any of that here.  Let me take you on a journey to our Dining Facility, or DFAC:

 We have two DFACs on this base, and they really aren't far from one another.  They both serve the same food but the nice DFAC does have cushioned chairs and usually stocks Diet Coke. 

  Everyone who enters the DFAC is required to wash their hands.  This is a great practice for anyone, whether you are living in a bacteria-ridden place or not.  We all learn how to wash our hands growing up and it's a great way to combat disease. However, here we are forced to wash our hands with scalding hot water.  It's like a test of will to keep your hands in the water long enough to rinse off all the soap.  Instead of paper towels for drying, we have Dyson blade blowers.  This is my favorite part of visiting the DFAC (that should tell you how this story will go).  It's like a fun house for your hands.  You stick them in and air blows out at hurricane-wind speeds to push the water right off your hands!  I like watching the way my skin pulls away from my bones and flaps in the wind.

After playing with the finger funhouse, I walk down the hall, scan my meal card and grab a paper plate.  I then move to the meal line and usually want to cry.  There are a few items we have every lunch and dinner:

   Pasta with a red sauce and white sauce
   Either fried rice of some sort or stir-fry noodles

Now, you might be thinking.."that doesn't sound too bad"...you are wrong.  None of the above options offer any flavor value whatsoever.  I actually tried the "3-cheese sauce" today.  It tasted like dirty water.  It may have been dirty water for all I know.  Great, now I think I ate dirty water sauce today.  Sadly, the dirty water flavor is almost an improvement over the complete absence of flavor I normally experience there.

For main dish options, they like to keep it exciting and rotate things out on a bi-weekly schedule.  Here are some of my favorite meal options:

   - Tuna and onion pizza, hot dog pizza (don't ask)
   -  Fish pie (not sure what kind of fish and I really am not interested in knowing)
   -  Hawaiian style Gammon (spam with pineapple on it)
   -  Quorn lasagna (no, I did not misspell the vegetable that grows on a cob - google it and share in my disgust)
    - Turkey burger (not an actualy burger..rather flat pieces of cut turkey that I am supposed to put in a bun)
    - Egg burger (see above...same concept)
    - Dessicated Sponge Cake
    - Creamed Leeks
    - Meat-Glazed Potatoes (no, I am not making that up)
    - Frankfurter Curry
    - Schnitzel.  Turkey Schnitzel, chicken schnitzel, quorn schnitzel, schintzel on a stick....do Germans really eat everything schnitzel?  I don't think so..I think it's laziness on the part of our cooks. Fry everything and call it freaking schnitzel!!

  This is just what I can remember and I don't eat at the DFAC very often.  Given the above menu choices, can you blame me?

     I pass through the line and usually get the fried rice or noodles.  Not because either option is really edible but because the DFAC does have bottled chili sauce that isn't half-bad.  Then, I move to the salad line....I have to use the term "salad" loosely.  We have lettuce and either cucumbers or shredded carrot.  Oh, and usually olives and those little baby onions.  That's as good as the salad gets folks.Every once in a while, they have crab sticks too.  Yes, processed crab sticks. Now, I don't do seafood so I really could care less, but for Christ's sake, THEY KEEP THE PLASTIC SEPARATORS ON THE CHUNKS O'CRAB! Who does that? Would it really kill them to at least pretend it's real crab meat instead of processed whatever it is?  At the end of the salad bar, they have big plastic containers of salad dressing type substances.  I never know what it is because it's rarely labelled.  I know I have seen "garlic oil dressing" and "orange dressing" and I think one is blue cheese but really can't tell.

  After that comes the cheese and meats platter.  There is always grated parm (for the past maybe) and then usually two different types of cheese. On a great day, we get little chunks of brie but sometimes it's blue cheese, cheddar cheese or that white, processsed, half-melted cheese.  When they don't know what kind of cheese they are serving; it's Emmantel cheese.  My good friend, Lt B, pointed out that they had two different cheeses the other day but both were labelled Emmantel.  Sadly, this isn't uncommon so there's no telling what I eat half the time. 

   The meats are always an interesting site.  The meat quality here seems to be a source of concern for a lot of folks on base.  If any of you have ever eaten Scrapple, you should be able to visualize this.  Scrapple is a processed pig product.  The parts of the pig that aren't even good enough for hot dogs are mixed together and pressed into Scrapple.  That's what all the lunch meats here look like.  Even the turkey slices don't look right.  It's not a slice of turkey breast. I think someone ground up all the extra parts not deemed good enough to make a turkey hot dog and made it lunch meat.  I bet their is ground beak in there somewhere. 

     If I still haven't made a meal of these delectable creations, I can go to the Sandwich line.  The lunch meat at the sandwich line is just a depressing as at the meat station.  Fortunately, they usually have "tuna mayonnaise" and "chicken mayonnaise" to eat.  Apparently, calling it tuna or chicken salad woudl be false advertising. I at least admire their honesty. If you want a sandwich, here are your garnish options:

    -Mustard
    - Lettuce
    - Onion
    - Pickles
    -On special days, Branston pickles (some kind of purple stuff the Brits like)
   - Slice of cheese, still in the plastic wrapper. I'm serious here, they throw the slice on your plate..so if I ask for a wrap, I have to unwrap it to add the cheese. You only get one slice per sandwich.

My favorite thing about the sandwich is the portion size.  It's the same regardless of bread type. I get one regular eating spoon's worth of tuna or chicken if I choose a wrap or a big ass bun.  It's just enough meat to make me feel like I'm not eating plain bread.

If you enjoy the fruit, then you are in luck. We have a fruit bar! Sadly, the fruit is rationed to one piece a person.  The choices do change but the standards are bananas (over-ripe), apples and some kind of melon.  Since they won't give you a whole melon (and really, that would be a bit much), they cut it up and give you one small bowl of melon pieces.  I personally love that the military wants me to eat my fruits and vegetables while giving me so little access to either here on this base.  Now, to be fair, American DFACs don't seem to have this problem...and our base is known throughout Afghanistan for the bad food.  We are not the norm.

Dejected and once again disappointed, I find a table and sit to my meal.  We have no salt and pepper shakers, so I tear open my little packets and try to season my food with my airline meal-sized salt and pepper.  I reach across the table and grab a napkin, unwrap my plasticware and wish I were eating an MRE instead.