I can attest to USMC stateside Cold War Era chow being pretty lame. The Navy shore station food wasn't much better. Never ate at an Army installation of any kind I can recall. Overseas on Okinawa the Corps food was horrible! Baked (BAKED!) rabbit 3x a week, green tomatoes, brown lettuce, stale bread, "veal parmigiana" that was breaded flank steaks in tomato sauce, the worst burgers you ever ate in your life, etc. C-rats were many levels above the mess hall food, but you couldn't just choose them. OTOH, any chance I had to go over to Kadena AFB I'd take and eat there. What food! It was like eating in stateside restaurant! The AF chickies like Marines too!
I tried grits in North Carolina and Mississippi. Maybe it was because it was USMC/USN food, but if I wanted to eat wall paper paste, I'd just eat wall paper paste. I also tried what is called "chili" down south. Sorry, but acidic, burning hot conglomerations of multiple types of chiles is not "chili" in my book. Lots and lots of kidney beans, hamburg, onion, diced tomatoes, etc. and some mild spices. Add in cornbread and you have a great meal that will stick with you for hours. If I needed an excuse to drink gallons of beer to quell the burn, I suppose that other stuff would be a great excuse.
Jails. I used to live in the least populated county in NYS. 1800 sq mi, about 4K people last I knew. The county jail was a 2 cell affair in the rear of the Courthouse. The sheriff lived there and collected the jailers salary. His wife did the cooking and collected the cooks salary. I think his daddy, who of course was Sheriff before him and then served as Undersheriff well into his late 80's, did the same thing. The sheriff looked, acted like and was about as big around as Boss Hog from The Dukes of Hazzard. Last I knew he had his son in law lined up to be the next sheriff. If you ate there, you ate really good. The inmate(s) ate the same food as the sheriff. You could do a lot worse than spending the winter in that jail, that's for sure. The politics of it were laughable, but that's life in rural America.