I was stationed at Nellis AFB (in Las Vegas) and we had the best food. It was really good. I ate at many other chow halls and Nellis was always a bit better. I think it was because we had people from all over the world training there and they wanted to impress them maybe??? They had one of the best omelets I’ve ever tasted. Egg, ham, white mozzarella cheese and American cheese cooked on a griddle. SO GOOD. Breakfast was always good I would get off swing shift and go eat a massive breakfast for like $2 or some silly price like that. I would get an omelet, SOS, grits, couple slices of bacon, bowl of ceral and glasses and glasses(free refills) of milk. STUFFED.

For dinner on swing shift we had take out place with typical fried chicken with fried potato wedges and stuff like that. Hamburgers. Take out stuff.

Just curious if anyone else feels the same. I used to love chicken. Any kind, fried broiled, any kind, now…some of it makes me gag. Is it me or has the chicken taken on a ghastly taste in the last say 30 years???? I can barely eat chicken now it’s disgusting.

When I was at tech school we used to get rabbit every so often. It was good if greasy. We would joke that the chow hall people had spent all the food money up on beer blast so they had to shoot rabbits to feed us.

The military eating experience is quite the cross-cultural nightmare, sometimes. We were tasked to tear down one of the command post set-ups at a German kaserne, after REFORGER was over. Worked our asses off all day, and when we went to eat at the German mess facilities… Yikes. For some reason, they thought it appropriate to feed their “guests” at the Officer’s Mess, and all we had to show for dinner after working like dogs all day was a selection of cold cuts and brotchen, and not a lot of either. Meanwhile, we’re watching the German conscripts across the quad being fed great lashings of typical German enlisted food, which we could smell… Whatever it was, it had the most amazingly delicious odor wafting across to us, as we tried to make a meal out of some ham and dry bread. I have no idea why they didn’t want us over in the enlisted mess, but the Germans insisted we eat at the Officer’s Mess, and there we were, trying to be polite.

Thank God for the Kantine, where we finally got some real food at around eight in the evening. We probably spent a thousand dollars there on food and beer, and the little old lady who ran the place was ecstatic to have us there.

From what experiences I’ve had, the Canadian messes were insanely great. The worst meal I’ve had with Canadians made the best meal I ever had at a non-holiday Army or Air Force mess facility look like a sad joke. Friend of mine who was a sub crewman for a bit told me that even the boomer crews didn’t eat as well as the Canadian Army did in the field.

The French, from what little I saw of them in Europe during the 1980s, did not eat well at all, particularly the conscripts. Officers and NCOs reputedly ate like kings, but the enlisted guys did not. Our guys who went off to French Commando School came back bitching about that fact, while the leadership cadre raved about how well they ate. The whole thing was really kind of weird, because with the US, everyone eats the same crap, and there are no separate messes in garrison or the field. And, the troops always eat first, served by the leadership, if it’s a good unit. Far more egalitarian, in that respect–It’s not the greatest food, but everyone eats the same.

Your reference to military breakfasts works both ways. When I was stationed in Dundurn at the ammo depot, I worked with a Warrant Officer from the Engineers, and he related how they often did joint maneuvers with the Brits at their leased training base in Suffield, Alberta, and how their nickname for the Brits was “shit-eaters”, as in;”We’re going on an exercise with the shit-eaters next week..”

This was mostly in reference to their field kitchen breakfast. Now for many people, the Full English Breakfast is proof of the advancement of civilization. Bacon, blood sausage, eggs, fried tomato and toast is wonderful (if you ignore the addition of the over-sweet baked beans), but the field kitchen variation where all the raw ingredients were dropped directly in a deep fryer for twenty seconds and then dumped (without draining), on your plate….

Likewise I recall a bit of a scandal when Canadian troops complained about the continental style breakfast served by the French in Bosnia…

In addition to drinking tea [but also coffee], and putting salt and vinegar as my number one fry topping, other British legacies for me include HP sauce and Worcestershire sauce.

Also both good on eggs, actually.

Kirk- don’t know if you ever had HP. It’s a brown sauce in a squared off plastic bottle to be found here shelved among similar products like A1 steak sauce. It has Worcestershire sauce in it directly plus other Worcestery ingredients like tamarind paste, so it tastes sweeter, slightly fishier perhaps, and with a different spice taste than barbecue style steak sauces. It’s unusual in being a British product still widely available in Canada without going to a specialty store. Although if you do go to a specialist in British goods, it reminds you that they have many additional flavours of HP besides regular.

When i was 12 or so my parents took me on annual cross border shopping and cultural acclimatization trips to Western New York. Mostly suburban Buffalo. One year a grand driving tour down to the Finger Lakes and Corning. We often ate in restaurants in the Eastern Hills Mall of Amherst, NY. They had a breakfast place of some sort and a Friendly’s.

I remember even then just as you say- the breakfast place had lots of perfectly familiar stuff to me, it being just across the border and the way of life similar, but Southern-inflected.

Grits for sure was on the menu. I think we tried them. Chicken fried steak, first time I heard of that.

The other thing was their mystification at my mother’s constant request for tea. They had it, always, no problem, they just had to distinguish out loud between hot and iced in a way Canadians generally wouldn’t. Tea without modifier is always hot tea for us. I assumed that was a southern thing and later introductions to southern tea culture cemented that belief.

I should also note I recently had a colleague of German birth who, at several work pot-luck occasions, produced currywurst in the form of a stew in a crockpot. If you are going to make anything with chopped up hot dogs, this is the way to do it.

There’s a lot of weirdnesses about staple foods across the Anglosphere, especially for breakfast purposes. You go to eat at an American military “dining facility”, and you’re going to find that the comestibles you’re offered are all stereotypical fare of the American South… Most of which are decidedly an acquired taste. Grits? Yikes. Unless heavily “cheesed and baconned”, as one of my friends put it, they’re usually horrible. The rest of it is generally bland and flavorless, although you may luck out and find an occasional cook who can turn out a decent omelette.

But I should point out that I am an immigrant, and brought my mayo and Marmite with me from “home”, and though I have picked up many Canadianisms, ketchup on eggs is not one of them.

I also still drink a lot of tea, and suffered in my initial military service in that Canadians in general had gone through what you called the Americanization of our food, and coffee drinkers outnumbered tea drinkers. The field rations consequently only included tea in about ten percent of the time. I was forced to become a coffee drinker (or more of a coffee drinker) in consequence.

Yes, that’s closer to how I think of mayo, I think, as “topping”, not “base grease.” No harm, no foul about how much or when it’s used as a topping. The surprise for me was always in the ubiquity I found up here.

I did also give some thought to the idea that foundational use of mayo was also, or instead:

- a generational change over time that I just happened to experience geographically

- an Americanization of our food culture that just happened around that time. I assumed ketchup long ago was this.

- an ordinary universal Canadianism from which I’d been arbitrarily insulated by chance and parental habits. Some elements of our household food culture were a bit British-inflected. We DID have mayo, though. Or its artificial cousin, Miracle Whip. And my dad was a prodigious ketchup applicator.

Question for you- ketchup on scrambled eggs, Y or N?

On Ottawa, in addition to mayo as spread, you’re right I did notice even back 20 years ago that it had appeared as a condiment for fries in about every pub. Now you can get it for that purpose in premium burger places and even at Harvey’s.

Interesting comment on cultural differences.

I would have expected that anyone who ate Balut would/could eat anything.

Interesting, as now that I think of it, Marmite is an example of exactly the phenomena you described. I have mentioned before that I have become something of a fan of Japanese Anime. There is a Youtube channel run by a western expat who lives in Japan and reviews Anime and Japanese pop culture.

He is famous enough, that for publicity purposes, a J-pop idol group arranged for him to play a popular Japanese game RPG/card game, with the loser eating unpleasant (to them) things. When he lost, they fed him various Japanese seafood items (urchin roe and similar stuff that they knew made westerners gag). When he won, he gave them Marmite flavoured chips and so on, since he knew from experience that Marmite simply cannot be tolerated as a flavour by Japanese people.

Pretty much what my bother and I both do, although on sandwiches it will be butter on the bread and mayo as a topping. I don’t use mayo ISO butter on, for example, peanut butter on toast, or breakfast toast in general, but otherwise, if there is a meat component, the mayo goes on.

I had no idea Ottawa was a pocket of BENELUX culinary taste!

Vegemite I have never tried and it always sounded gross.

Then again, I tried marmite itself last year for the first time [neither of my British-born parents liked it so we never had it when I was a kid]. I suppose I’ll give it another go at some point but I believe the best use of onomatopoeia to describe my reaction would be “hooooaaagh.”

I like mayo fine as an “alternative spread” or a flavour-addition type dressing, like one would use ketchup or mustard, but when I moved from Toronto to Ottawa I was introduced to the idea that people could use it as an all-purpose grease in any situation where butter was used. That seemed like overkill to me but people here put mayo on everything all the time.

Though it did introduce me to the flavour combination of green relish and mayo on a burger at Harvey’s. Oh yeah.

With that Filipino guy- was it the juniper or the rottenness? Juniper can be a powerful & strange flavour in anything but its proper, gin-based, form, but rotten meat has always been a trigger for me. I’ll probably have to give that another try at some point too.