I’m a fairly simple person. I really appreciate the simple pleasures in life. One of those simple things that really makes me happy is eating good food. I left home at 18 years old and have spent my time at various different endeavors that have led me to where I am today. One thing I learned very quickly after leaving home was that my mother didn’t want to follow me around to keep cooking for me which was a bit of a disappointment. The Army isn’t typically known for its fine cuisine, but one of my fonder memories of being in Iraq was the local food.

We were trained to be self-sufficient. If we were going out for what was to be a multi-day operation we carried our food with us. The names of the military meals have changed over time, but one thing that has not is the quality of the food. MRE’s is what they are now. High calorie food smashed into a vacuum sealed bag and packaged in a way that’s easy to carry. They came with such names as meat loaf, tuna sandwich, or chicken tetrazzini, but without the name being written on the package you’d have a hard time distinguishing one from the other. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner, it was the same all the time. I found that you could get more taste if you took everything in the packaging, mixed it all together into a mush, and then put salt and pepper on it. Eventually, I looked for new options and my solution was I started buying cans of Chef Boyardee beeferoni. This was my new meal of choice. It was hearty, tasty, and as long as it wasn’t cold it wasn’t gelatinous like the MRE’s.

Then there were the times we were lucky enough to get to eat with Iraqi people and whatever they were eating. This happened most often when we would stay on an Iraqi Army base or at one of the Iraqi police stations around town. We always made jokes about what the stuff were we eating actually was, but there was no doubt about how fresh the food was when we sat and watched them butcher the goat, sheep, chickens, or cow that we were going to eat for dinner. Luckily I didn’t mind this as I grew up on a hobby farm and routinely participated in butchering chickens and then eating them. A little more rarely were the times we would be invited into an Iraqi family’s house for dinner.

It meant a great deal to me to be invited into someone’s house for dinner. We dealt a lot with the more seedy side of the population there, and it was sometimes easy to start thinking that everyone was against you. When a family invited you into their home and used broken English to try to communicate with you, and seeing their family all together, everyone taking part in the cooking. There is just something nice and relaxing when you sit down with someone to share a meal. We could spend all day outside on a mission involving firefights and violence, but it was the next best thing to being home to sit with people and have a home-cooked meal. It was a nice reminder of being home, because even in war-torn Iraq, when it was time to eat all the guys would congregate around the grill and critique the cook’s technique. It just reminded you that there were still some good people out there since we spent a lot of our time dealing with evil people with evil intentions.

Despite the fact that I was violently ill for about a month with dysentery from eating some questionably prepared chicken, the local food is still one of the good things I remember from Iraq. When we were fortunate enough to eat with people who had real food it was almost like we were back home. Just a bunch of friends hanging out together eating some good food.

drfarwell@hotmail.com