"3 hots and a cot" is simply not the truth these days. When I relocated to a base in Texas, and this is not an exaggeration, I slept in the bed of my truck for 2 weeks, despite telling someone of the issue every day of my inprocessing, because they wouldn't assign me a room till the processing was complete.
If you trusted the army to feed you, you would go hungry. Didn't matter if it was on a field exercise or a normal day around the company area. I learned to make sure enough calories were on hand to sustain myself independently of any support unit. Look how far back that article had to go to find a picture of someone cooking food that wasn't a boiled bag of eggs. Often you couldn't even get that. To top it off, they deducted from our pay to cover food, even when the nearest facility would be a 25min drive away, or they would run out of food, etc.
As an institution, based on my experience, I would argue that the army does not care about its soldiers. A smaller percentage of senior NCOs and officers care enough to go to bat at the risk of their career, but that is not the norm from my perspective. Most would rather not rock the boat.
Cooks are probably one of the most under appreciated MOS, and simultaneously one of the most hated. The ones good at their job, that care, are too few and far between. They have terrible schedules, even in a peacetime garrison setting. They have such a low threshold to entrance that anyone can be shuffled into that job may or may not be able to read and write (only half joking.) It's a terrible job and it's a terrible job to rely on for sustenance. If you want to eat healthy, all the above gets even harder on the soldier.
